The Never Series
by Ergott
Summary: Have you every thought something was a bad idea, but done it anyway? So has Sarah. This is a series of short stories, mostly AU's, about that very thing. J/S
1. Goblin King's Closet

_**The Never Series**_

Never One: It's been a few years since Sarah faced down the Goblin King and walked away victorious; neither of them really expected to ever see each other again. But Sarah, in a moment of blind panic, makes a very strange mistake.

Genre: Romance, Adventure, Multiple Folklores

Rating: M

* * *

Never Nose Through A Goblin King's Closet

It didn't happen often, but occasionally Sarah took the time to reflect upon her mistakes. This one ranked rather highly on her list of bad decisions, somewhere between _wishing your brother away_ and _letting Brad Mikals pop your cherry_. It had started out rather innocently though, which was strange since most of the events that made her list came from doing things she knew she shouldn't. The naughty brat streak ran a mile wide in her.

But this one hadn't been like that and, further separating it from her other bad decisions, it had been _years_ in the making. She could pinpoint exactly when it had started, a handful of years ago when she had only been fourteen, on the very night that she had conquered the Labyrinth.

It had been a night for celebration—_she'd saved her brother!_—and nearly all the strange creatures she had met on her journey had packed her room from wall to wall with games and dancing.

_Nearly_ all.

Oh sure, the guests of honor had been there, after all there wouldn't have been much to celebrate if it hadn't been for Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus. They had helped her in more ways than she would ever be able to count and she had no doubt that she never would have made it through each successive level of the Labyrinth if it hadn't been for their guidance. She'd probably still be trapped in an oubliette if it weren't for Hoggle!

But the guest of _dishonor_ hadn't made an appearance. Not that Sarah had expected him to, but… she had rather hoped he would, even if just to sneer at her and act like a sore loser. For several days after the party, her naughty brat side had tried to convince her that the desire had only stemmed out of an urge to lord her victory over Jareth, but she knew better. Thoughts of the ethereal king had taken up residence in a dark corner of her mind, and it wouldn't have been going too far to say that she had become quietly obsessed with him.

And, though she was ashamed to admit it, that had been half the reason she had stayed in such good contact with her Underground friends. Each new conversation became a puzzle to muse over for hours on end, looking for even the barest mention of how Jareth might be fairing or what he was up to. As one year bled away into two, her friends had become more daring and opened portals for her to visit the Underground. On those occasions Sarah was careful not to let her dark interest slip and had spent many an interesting afternoon viewing the wonders of her friends' homes. Then two years faded to three, and her friends became downright impish, suggesting a trip into the Goblin City. They had walked right up to the castle in broad daylight, a silent kick to Jareth's ego.

And it had thrilled her. The inner brat had crowed joyously at her brassy actions while the hopeless romantic nearly melted at the faint touch of his powerful aura.

They should have ended it there, they should have left well enough alone. But they hadn't. For months after that, the four of them had explored every secret passageway, every nook and cranny of the old castle until Sarah felt that she knew it better than her own home. The brat was pleased with her silent invasion of his territory, but the young woman was overwhelmingly disappointed that, in all those months of lurking behind his walls, she never once caught sight of him. Not even a stray glimmer of blond hair or a jacket carelessly forgotten over the back of a chair. It was as if the man was a ghost in his own home.

And it was absolutely maddening.

She would dream of him on those nights following her little adventures. Dreams of a pale and seductive god, thrust into her world for no other reason than to tempt her. She was glorifying him, she knew that. The real Jareth was like satin laced with barbed wire: smooth and bewitching, but rough around the edges and more than capable of cutting someone to ribbons. Her dreams cared little for reality though, and in those nocturnal fancies the Goblin King began to consume a dangerous amount of her; already obsessed with the man, she could ill afford to lose anymore of herself to him. But, with a worrying frequency, her thoughts turned more and more to an unearthly face that she was terrified she would forget. Soon, the blue gaze and commanding presence that had once held her captive would fade from her mind, a distant and murky memory that she would chase after and never catch.

That thought scared her more than it should have. She had every reason to hate the man. He had refused to return her brother, even though they both knew she hadn't really meant to wish Toby away; he had dogged her steps within the Labyrinth, making her journey as hard as possible; he had forced Hoggle to give her that stupid peach, adding a whole new mistake to her list of bad decisions—_eating hallucinogenic fruit_; and, to top it all off, he had teased her with everything she couldn't have. Oh, it would have been easy to forsake Toby—the brother she had never cared for until he had been taken away—and the brat inside her had set its eyes firmly on the bait that Jareth dangled just out of reach. Himself. And she had wanted him, fiercely, with the deep-seated hunger of a young woman who was just beginning to open her eyes to carnal possibilities. But the universe thrived on balance, and for every brat there was a voice of reason. No matter how badly she had wanted Jareth, she knew, deep down where it really counted, that even if she didn't like the baby, she still had to save him; she would not condemn an innocent child for the sake of her own immaturity. So, in the end, Jareth's offers had tormented more than they had appealed to her.

But that hadn't stopped the Goblin King from haunting her thoughts.

As year three became year four, Sarah decided it was time to lock the dangerous obsession away. No puberty-challenged boy from school would ever compare to Jareth, but she hadn't seen even the barest hint of him in four years, and she was getting mighty tired of being the only girl in her group of friends that didn't have a boyfriend.

It hadn't always been easy but, for a while, she had reveled in just being a normal girl. She pushed away anything that could lead her thoughts back to Jareth, slowly pulling away from her otherworldly friends and refusing to return for any adventures Underground. That, more than anything, had shut her inner brat up. And, without the constant torment of fantasy and desire, or devilish urges from the demon under her skin, normal life had actually been pretty fun.

Enter Bad Decision List entry number three, Brad Mikals.

They'd been playmates as children, but had grown up and away from each other as the years passed. In a peripheral sort of way they'd always been friendly, but more like distant acquaintances than old friends, so it had come as something of a shock when he asked her out. Handsome, quirky Brad had seemed like a safe choice. He was well known without being part of the popular High Society, he was funny and kind, still reminded her of that laughing little boy who had chased her through the playground, and she really did like him.

They'd made a striking couple: a tall, ginger-haired teen and the dainty dark-haired girl at his side; people had dubbed them the Redhead and the Raven. And they complimented each other well; she livened him up with her wild-child love of adventure, and he kept her grounded in the mundane world that was suddenly holding so much interest for her. Dating had once been boring and awkward for Sarah, but Brad changed that, let her be herself when other men would have found it exasperating.

And all too soon, as so often happened with hormonally charged teenagers, things had started to get hot and heavy between them. Sex had never really been a question, somehow they had both known that things would end up there and, honestly, Sarah could think of very few other men at school that she would have trusted enough to give her virginity to. Brad was safe and familiar and she knew that, even if the experience wasn't satisfying in the end, he would do his best not to hurt her any more than he had to.

But, in that single moment when he pierced her maidenhead, Sarah knew she had made a mistake.

The first time hurt, she knew that and it wasn't as though she had gone into the situation expecting very much. But, deep down, she had always felt that in giving pleasure she would receive it in return; some long hidden, innately feminine part of her had thought that, with the gift of her submission, with hearing his cries of passion and adoration, she would achieve some measure of satisfaction. But, as sweet Brad rose lovingly above her, she felt nothing, save for pain where it could least be tolerated.

Sarah didn't mourn the loss of her virginity; a membrane that nature had granted in the most inopportune of places was not something worth grieving over. She didn't mourn over the fact that there would never be another first-time for her. What she mourned was that the experience left her with nothing, that her first real exploration into her sexuality—that coveted first-time that burned itself into a woman's memory—had been an absolute failure. She had always considered herself sensual at heart, and this disappointment tore at her.

In that moment of weakness, of solitary contemplation in the aftermath of a deed that had only taken place the day before, the demon had slipped its leash.

_What if it was just the boy?_ Her inner brat had asked snidely. _Sweet but inexperienced; Brad can make you tingly, but he never made you burn. And you have burned before, haven't you? Let's face the facts, Sarah, compared to _Him_ every man will come in at a poor second._

Her voice of reason tried very hard to push the thoughts down, back into the dark corner where she had locked away everything about the Goblin King.

But the brat was not about to be ignored.

_Remember the way those azure-flame eyes pierced into you? How they seemed to look straight into your core so that they could offer you everything you were never brave enough to ask for?_ the brat purred. _Remember how he just seemed to _drip_ seduction, even when he was intimidating? _She paused then, with a wicked laugh, added, _Or maybe _because_ he was intimidating._

Sarah closed her eyes, trying not to think about _that_ particular quirk in her preferences.

_You'd like that, wouldn't you, Sarah? _The brat purred on, obviously vindictive after being ignored for so long. _All those sexy, lean muscled bunched and ready to strike as your fantasy man gets demanding._

"Shut up!" It didn't bear reflecting that she had technically been shouting at herself, but that inner voice had started to sound much too good.

_Does the past hurt, honey?_ the brat mocked. _Remember how good he always looked? How his clothes were always tight and teasing? You could have had that. But no, instead you're sitting all alone in your room, post-cherry-popping, and lamenting things that cannot be changed!_

"I'm not going back to that stupid adolescent obsession; I spent so much time thinking about him that I almost stopped living in the real world!"

_But don't you miss the way he smelled?_ A longing sigh._ Like sex and cinnamon. _

Oh god, did she ever! Her mouth watered and her heart clenched at the mere remembrance of it.

And that—fates preserve her!—was when the collective innocence of four years bled straight out of the situation, when the naughtiness crept back into the brat, and an interesting thought became a very bad decision.

_You know your way Underground, y'know,_ the brat had suggested slowly,_ maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use. You could get a little memento positively drenched in that wonderful scent of his; I mean, the man changes his clothes so often he'd probably never notice if something went missing._

The fact that the idea didn't set off warning bells for her should have been a clear indication that her obsession had not truly been dealt with or diminished in any way. But her alarms remained silent and, the more she thought about it, the better the idea sounded. If the brat hadn't been so persistent, so powerful in a time of uncertainty, she would have given herself a day or two to think things over, ample time to discard the idea as risky and ridiculous, but the brat was strong and Sarah was desperate to recapture something that would remind her of the passion she knew she could feel.

In a single leap, the suddenly agile teen had vaulted over her bed, rushed to her closet door, and firmly flicked the doorknob.

The idea had been Sir Didymus', two or three years ago. After it had become apparent that Jareth wasn't going to wreak divine retribution against any of them for Sarah's appearances Underground, they had all agreed that it would be safest to find her a stable portal to use. It had been Didymus—bless the cunning old fox—that had returned with Alice's Door, as he called it. Together they had used it to replace the door of her closet and decided, to avoid any unnecessary accidents and so that she could still have the use of her closet, that to trigger the door one had to flick rather forcefully against the doorknob. The bruised fingertips were mildly unwelcome, but it was a small price to pay for her very own portal into another world.

It was always a bit of a gamble as to where the portal spit her out—sometimes she found herself in the middle of the hedge maze, the junkyard, the tunnels and, on one notable occasion, stuck on a bolder in the middle of the Bog—but this time fortune had smiled on her, setting her down within the narrow space of her favorite hidden passage in the Goblin Castle. It had been months, nearly a year, since she had traversed those well memorized halls, and to suddenly find herself surrounded by the familiar sights and sounds felt like that urgent and giddy first breath of fresh air after having stayed underwater for far too long.

Sarah knew her way to Jareth's room but, either by some strange fluke or because he had designed it that way, there were no secret passageways that actually connected to it. Every other room in the castle had its own network of servant's passages and escape tunnels, so she had often figured that he was either paranoid or valued his privacy very deeply. Though she knew the way there, she had never actually been within his room, had never even come close enough to dare trying. Tonight was different; the torch lit halls were empty, the brat was riding her hard, and in all her post-conquering-the-Labyrinth adventures she hadn't even seen Jareth's shadow. At that moment she had been more worried about crossing paths with a goblin than she had been of their king.

The door had opened and closed on silent hinges and the room that laid beyond it had astounded Sarah. It was a world of dark wood furniture, stained-glass windows, and heavy drapes; a haven of velvet and Irish linen coverings. Soft candles burned lowly throughout the room, allowing just enough dark for the shadows to play with the unwary. Here and there was a personal touch, a bauble that likely had more meaning to the Goblin King than any actual value. Fraying ribbons peeked playfully from between the pages of a book, a cord of soft-brushed leather dangling from a cabinet knob banded together a mismatched group of feathers, a piece of rough hewn wood rested idly on the desk and next to it, flashing gently in the candlelight, was a wicked, ebony-handled carving knife.

Sarah had been halfway to a door that she was guessing belonged to the closet when the baby-fine hair at the back of her neck stood on end. Without knowing why or how she had known the feeling was caused by the massive bed dominating a large portion of one wall, her gaze had quickly swiveled in that direction, half expecting to see a pair of blue eyes staring back at her. The relief she felt at finding the bed devoid of any people had almost blinded her to what _was_ there.

Bonds.

Some were rough and twine-like, others like silky scarves, and a few even looked suspiciously like belts. Dotted here and there were manacles and other hand or ankle restraints, hidden among the pillows like macabre stuffed animals.

Sarah had roughly swallowed at the lump that had formed in her throat and quickly looked away. She had obviously stumbled upon a den of excess, unless Jareth had a thing for tying himself up. In that moment, while she had tried to banish the image of the bed that had burned itself into her mind, it had started to seem like a very good idea to just get what she wanted and leave.

The closet was a pleasant surprise, large and lofty with a towering assortment of shelves and drawers. Light spilled into the room from no identifiable source, a soft, pulsing glow that illuminated the clothing but carried the intimate atmosphere from the bedroom. It was, by no means, a modern closet but nor was it an anachronistic throwback. Most of the Labyrinth had a vaguely medieval air to it, but the closet felt timeless, as though it reflected no period of history and existed in whatever time it pleased. Silk breeches mixed with woolen trousers and heavy denim jeans; linen business shirts lived alongside satin frocks and soft looking sweaters. It was bewildering and didn't seem to follow any sort of order that she could discern; all the same, each shelf held a new discovery and every drawer was a surprise. In the low lighting, surrounded by strange and interesting clothes that smelled purely of sex, cinnamon, and magic, she had forgotten about the urgency that had flooded her just moments prior.

And that was, more or less, how she found herself trapped between a row of scarves and a very frustrated looking Jareth, her mind running through all the reasons this had turned out to be a bad idea while she stared blankly at the man framed by the closet door.

Sarah backed up a few steps, nearly flush to the wall, then stood perfectly still, taken over by the timeless instincts of a creature that knows it's being faced by a beast. No sudden movements to excite the predatory instinct, no noises to irritate the hunter into action, no visible signs of fear to betray any weaknesses to the creature. Shallow but even breaths breezed through the small parting of her lips and, though she knew it was against one of the rules that were suddenly flaring bright in her mind, she felt fear icing its way through her veins. Faced with the reality of Jareth, when she had stupidly and naively not expected it, was like a slap to the face that had adrenalin flooding her system and sending signals that conflicted painfully with the instincts that had reared up within her. Fight or flight is what the adrenalin demanded, while instinct persisted that she exude as non-threatening an air as she could so that the predator would lose interest and leave.

It was an interesting reaction, some distant part of her brain acknowledged, that she should view him as some sort of primal hunter and that that simple identification raised forth a mess of visceral thoughts and actions that were not strictly associated with humans. She had learned of racial memory in biology and had always thought that the idea was absolutely ridiculous, that some events in the human experience could be so profound that its subsequent effect would become _part_ of humanity and be borne into each successive generation. The concept had seemed perfectly laughable right up until about a minute ago, when she had locked gazes with the creature before her, emerald green ensnared by electric blue. All too easily, Sarah could picture the proud and arrogant Jareth leading wild hunts, flushing humans out from their hiding places and capturing them with the ease of a natural predator. It was possible that it hadn't happened that way, that perhaps their respective species had never mixed in the past, but the uneasy fluttering of her heart and the vague, half-formed images that floated through her imagination suggested otherwise.

His blue gaze drilled into her, intense and laden with frustration, quickly becoming more than she could meet. Darting her eyes away provided little relief—she could still feel the weight of his stare—but it allowed her to take in her first real glimpse of him in years.

_Dear god_, how she had romanticized him! The disparities between what she saw and what she remembered where slight in most cases, yet alarming all the same.

Jareth's hair was still blond and unaccountably wild, but streaked with a glittering earthy green; runic designs danced under one eye, along the ridge of a well defined pectoral, and across his brow, forming a delicately etched circlet; his skin glowed a pearly silver, the perfect counterpoint to hair that didn't quite hide the impish points of his slightly elongated ears; his body was lithe and muscled, displayed to perfection in what she could only describe as a strangely decorated kilt over what appeared to be deerskin trousers. He growled then, a deep, bestial sound that rumbled low in his throat, curling back his lips in a vicious looking snarl. She had remembered his teeth as having looked rather canine, but what she saw now was sharper, fang-like and frightening.

"Why is it," he asked with quiet anger, "that every time I try to do right by you, you throw the effort right back into my face?"

Hundreds of thoughts danced through her mind and died on her tongue; something about him was different, something aside from his appearance. It cowed her, that strange sense of _extra_. _Unacceptable_, her pride snarled. Sarah had stood against him before with nothing on her side but sheer will alone. There was no way she would face him now as a shivering mess of jangled nerves. Bravado came like second nature, and for once the brat might actually come in handy.

She schooled her thoughts, threw a haughty mask up, and never once thought about moving away from her spot on the wall. "New look?" she asked blandly, ignoring his question.

"Old," Jareth replied, matching her tone, " very, _very_ old." He took a step forward, still blocking the exit, and as he did shadows seemed to slither up from his palms to dance around his forearms where they flickered and solidified into thick leather guards.

"Could have fooled me," she shot back glibly, her heart beating a rapid staccato against her breast. He was like a darkly sensual fantasy that had been dragged through the murky delirium of a nightmare. As much as she hated to admit it, he was just as tempting as he was terrifying.

His gaze raked over her, unreadable and alien. "I _did_," he finally replied. "Your kind is never ready for reality, you always need something that's more _human_, so that's what I gave you."

The man of four years ago had been a watered-down, modified illusion of the creature that now stood before her. He still smelled like sex and cinnamon though; his eyes were still a shockingly clear blue, one pupil larger than the other; his face was still all angles and pure masculine arrogance. He was, essentially, the same person, there was just _more_ of him. "What made you change your mind?"

"I didn't," he snarled, taking another step forward. More shadows appeared, sweeping back the hair from his temples and wound them into tight plaits, reminding her of the ancient Greek and Celtic war braids. "How the _hell_ was I supposed to know that you were nosing through in my closet like some deranged frat boy on a panty raid?"

"I was not after your underwear!" Sarah snapped, momentarily forgetting her instinctual wariness as outrage crashed through her. Yeah, all right, she _had_ been after an article of clothing, but more along the lines of a shirt or jacket; underwear had seemed vulgar and pants too risqué. So what if she was a modern woman, she still had some sense of propriety.

"Could have fooled me," Jareth threw the words back at her.

A silence stretched between them then, one he made absolutely no attempt to fill. Explanations clamored for control of her lips, the automatic response of a brat caught red-handed. Somehow, though, she doubted that he would accept a plaintive, 'The devil made me do it,' so she remained staunchly silent.

A final pair of shadows slid down his arms, slipping beneath the leather guards, flowing over his gloved hands like a living liquid. For a moment they formed a tight seal over the heavy material, then ate away at them until it looked as though he had never been wearing gloves in the first place. His hands were large, strong, pale like the rest of him, and tapered off into fingers that were long and elegant without appearing feminine. Somehow the sight of his hands, of the pale appendages that she had never seen without some manner of encasement—linen, velvet, or leather—was unnerving. Gloves had simply been part and parcel of Jareth in her mind, and without them the moment seemed tense and strangely intimate.

Bravado could only hold her up for so long, and the more time that ticked by the less control Sarah felt she had over the situation. It was time to beat a hasty retreat, lick her wounds, and try not to obsess over the fact that this encounter brought the score up to Sarah- 1, Jareth- 1. It nagged at her pride as much as it had probably nagged at his those four years ago. Still, pride could only rob a girl of so much reason, and she definitely still had enough left over to realize that nothing good could come of this situation. It was time to end it.

"Well," Sarah said in the brisk and mocking manner of those who couldn't get away fast enough, "this was fun; we should do it again in another four years. Bye now." She took what could have barely been considered half a step before something grabbed at both her wrists from behind—halting her movement, dragging her back, anchoring her to the wall.

"A simple _get thee behind me_ won't work anymore, girl," Jareth tsked, coming within an arm's reach of her. "I was willing to be lenient, but you've been like a wolf pup, testing your boundaries by snapping at the heels of the pack leader." One bare hand came up to cup her chin, gently forcing her to meet his eyes. "Perhaps it's time that the alpha put you in your place."

The inner brat reared its head at his words, bristling at the challenge. "I beat your Labyrinth once, I could do it again," she snapped, ignoring the silky feel of his skin and how his touch seemed to open a hyper-awareness for him within her.

He laughed, a chilling sound that echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the closet. "No more games, Sarah," Jareth replied, running his thumb over her bottom lip, "just tradition. You run, and I chase."

She shivered, his words calling up another half-formed image: _this_ wild creature patiently stalking her steps from the shadows, waiting for the right moment to spring his trap. Racial memory or forgotten midnight fantasy? The fact that she couldn't quite answer that question was a little disturbing. The very idea was primal and mythic. _Mythic?_ The word suddenly gave her pause. There were countless myths and folk legends from countless countries about Others—the Nordic Hillmen, the Celtic Fae, the Slavic Leshii, the Druidic Green Man—and they all had one thing in common: the humans in those stories hardly ever evaded capture. That thought had the fine hair at the back of her neck rising on end and her suddenly dry mouth trying to push out a denial.

"No," she finally managed to say, proud of the firmness in her tone, "I just want to go home." Her wrists pulled against the strange scarves that held them to the wall, emphasizing her desire to leave.

Jareth shook his head and let his free hand trace the length of Sarah's forearm while the other hand began to stroke her jaw. "I was forgiving where no one else would have been," he murmured. "You wounded my pride and summarily rejected everything that I offered, but I was willing to let you go. Even when you began to flagrantly invade my home, I did everything within my power to ensure that we never crossed paths; it tried my patience nearly beyond endurance, but I was resolute. You've caught me off guard one time too many, however, and I'm tired of _pretending_ that I had no choice other than to let you leave."

"You're going to blame me for the failed seduction of a fourteen year old?" she asked incredulously, hoping that provocation would keep him off balance enough to find a way out of the situation before it got any worse. "Which, by the way, is illegal where I come from."

"And where I come from," he purred, eyes focusing on the slope of her neck, "I don't have to bother with seduction at all; I just take what I want."

She swallowed convulsively, her mind suddenly blooming with all manner of things that Jareth could _take_. The part of her that wasn't caught up in raunchy fantasies dimly realized that the situation was beyond salvaging at this point. Jareth was intent upon his plan, and Sarah was scared and aroused in equal measures, the fear and eroticism forming a powerful natural aphrodisiac that heightened both instinct and senses. Instinct told her what sort of dangers he could present to her, while her senses registered his soft touch and fleeting caresses, one feeding off the other until the fear was as delicious as the burning arousal that slowly licked its way down her abdomen.

His hand ghosted over the length of her arm, coming to rest at the spot on her neck that he seemed fixated with, fingers gently tracing over the sensitive erogenous zone. "Right here," he growled, approval lacing the roughly spoken words. "This will be the first spot I take once I get you," Jareth crooned lazily, but the warning in his tone was clear. No one else was to touch that spot, it was already _his_, was what he said without words.

"When does the chase end?" Sarah asked, her voice hitching when he began to tease the skin of her throat by lightly raking his nails over the smooth expanse.

"When I catch you," he answered with a slow smile, his eyes already dancing with a devilish inner light.

Which meant that, theoretically, the chase could go on forever, that the only way she could win would be to die, which wasn't really winning at all. She didn't like those kinds of odds. "Maybe we should—"

"I'll even be _generous_," he teased with a mocking smile, "and give you a head start."

And, just like that, she found herself staring at her own front door, Jareth's last words echoing in her ears. The burning question was, of course, how _much_ of a head start? She was inclined to say thirteen hours because that seemed relatively logical, given their past, but he hadn't specified so it could have been anywhere from minutes to years. That thought was like a damning black axe that could fall on her at any moment: running was pointless if you had no idea when you were actually being chased.

Sarah sighed in momentary stress, knowing that she was holding the full impact of the situation at bay by obsessing over little details. With an irritated shake of her head, she opened the door and walked to the stairs in the foyer with all the aplomb of an inmate on death row.

Karen, who had lately been on a cleaning spree, was dusting the banister and, though she never looked up to exchange pleasantries, she still said, "Hello Sarah. How was your day?"

"Oh, you know, the usual," she sighed. "Ran into a half-crazed immortal that I pissed off a couple years ago who is now bent on hunting me down in some sort of bizarre parody of sexual domination."

"That's wonderful, dear," Karen murmured.

Sarah figured Karen was either ignoring her or had simply taken that statement for her normal blend of sarcasm and metaphors. She was banking toward the ignoring, however, because if Karen had really been paying attention she would have realized that the younger woman had never left the house. Not by normal means, at any rate.

The comfort of her room seemed somewhat dimmed, she noted once she was enclosed within its walls; after all, Jareth could go anywhere he wanted in the blink of an eye.

The situation finally crashed down on her.

She was being chased—_hunted_—by a creature that she was beginning to realize she barely understood. Where she would have merely reacted with the huff and bluster of anger, Jareth had banked on instinct; primitive, brutal instinct. The Labyrinth had been a game, a washed-out childish version of the ancient rite that he was now evoking upon her. This wasn't the simple sport of tag between two playmates; he would run her down until she was exhausted, and then he would "take" her. Heaven help her if that had the same connotation to him as it did to her, because Sarah was pretty certain she wouldn't survive it, not after four long years of obsession, not after having just consented to a physical relationship with Brad Mikals. She had a feeling that none of that would seem particularly important to Jareth, though.

He was different and she was still trying to get her mind around that concept. The man she had met four years ago had been the epitome of civility and high class, there had always been a mocking and sardonic air about him but, at the same time, he had never strayed from courtly manner, even at his most menacing. Now she understood that it had been an act for her benefit. He looked different, he acted different; it was as if a veil had been ripped aside and she was finally seeing what had _really_ lain beneath all the flash and glamour that had blinded her those few years ago. He seemed more beast than man now, as though he knew what civility was but deigned not to practice it in favor of a more pagan existence. He was a natural predator with all the skills and cunning of that wolf he had compared himself to, and he was turning all that deadly focus on to her.

How were you supposed to protect yourself from that? Thousands of years ago man had led a more naturalistic lifestyle, they had been able to hunt and hide as well as any animal, and when Jareth's kind had threatened them it had probably been easier to find some semblance of safety. Unfortunately, she couldn't disappear into the morning mists like ancient man had. Sarah had responsibilities—school, a boyfriend, family—normal teenage concerns that now felt as though they were mooring her to the tiny town, keeping her trapped within its unprotected borders. Not that she could have left even if those matters hadn't kept her in constant obligation; the modern world made it difficult for someone to pass through life unnoticed. She couldn't cross the seas without a passport, couldn't drift from place to place without a large sum of cash that she didn't have, didn't know the first thing about camping in the wild or living off the land. The closest she had ever brushed to survivalist mentality had been in the Labyrinth, and back then she hadn't been running _away_ from something but, rather, _to_ something, which was completely different.

Sarah flopped gracelessly onto her bed, her mind running in circles. Logic dictated that she had to stay where she was and live out her life like normal; it wasn't as if she was a CIA agent who could drop off the radar at a moment's notice. She had no means by which to go anywhere, and no one would believe her if she asked for help, so she had no choice but to remain where she was. Then again, it wasn't necessarily such a bad situation. People tended not to look for things in obvious places, so perhaps hiding in plain sight wasn't such a bad idea. If their roles had been reversed Sarah knew that she would have automatically discounted looking at the Goblin Castle or the Labyrinth because it would have been way too obvious.

On the other hand, she didn't know when he was actually going to start the chase. What if Jareth waited a couple of years to lull her into a false sense of security? By then she would be in college, or perhaps even starting a career, outside the dubious safety of her little hometown; she still wouldn't have the means to disappear, and she would be out of his blind spot. She couldn't stay in her room forever—that was nothing but the recipe for a wasted life—but she would never feel comfortable leaving the protection of her home without the financial means to hie herself away at the drop of a hat.

It was classic psychological warfare, Sarah thought ruefully. By not telling her when he would begin his hunt, Jareth had ensured that she would be on constant edge, fighting against circumstances and fretting about the future, overtaxing her with the knowledge that she was being hunted without ever having to betray his presence.

Something whispered over her wrist, causing Sarah to choke on a scream. Her arm reared up in an instinctual move to get away but the sensation followed, meaning it was _on_ her, which was not a welcome thought. After several seconds worth of procrastination she worked up the nerve to dart a look, imagining all manner of horrific vermin or poisonous beastie. What she saw was almost worst.

It was one of the scarves from Jareth's closet, lazily twining itself around and over the length of her arm. The creature was a concoction of purple and red, glittering like a precious gem, and soft as crushed velvet. Its movements were serpentine in nature, reminding her of the snake that Jareth had thrown at her during their first meeting; then again, that snake had turned into a scarf for a brief moment, so perhaps it was the same little twist of magic that she had met before. For the life of her, Sarah couldn't figure out why it was there; perhaps Jareth had sent it along to keep an eye on her—if it even _had_ eyes—or perhaps it simply liked her. Its little head—or rather, what she assumed was its head—eagerly rubbed against the skin of her elbow, as though scenting her, so she was guessing that it _really_ liked her.

It was going to be a damn long night, Sarah thought with a sigh.

* * *

_Red oaks, birches, maples, lindens—trees of every imaginable species surrounded her, running off in erratic distances before disappearing into the fog like ancient mystics. A fine mist peppered the air, coating her dark hair in a bright sheen of crystalline droplets and slicking her skin with the chilly fog. It clung to her clothes, making what should have been a lightweight dress feel heavy and cumbersome and, above all, easy prey to the elements._

_The morning was dark, damp, and cold. Fog rose in ghostly coils in the predawn stillness, its inherent humidity more chilling than the light coating of ice that crackled over the fallen leaves. It was the sort of chill that crept into a person's bones and stayed there until they'd spent a few hours by a fire and had an extraordinarily hot meal. _

_Sarah shifted restlessly, the heat leeched out of her body from the dress that clung to her damp skin. The frostiness had already invaded her innermost centers of heat, thanks to the misty fog, and the wet clothes were completely unable to retain any heat that may have been left. Shivers wracked her body, automatic spasms of the muscle meant to generate warmth that, unfortunately, could neither be felt nor sustained. She rubbed her quickly numbing hands down the goose pimpled flesh of her arms, but she might as well have been running ice cubes over snow for all the good it did her._

_Seriously, she thought with no small amount of annoyance, who the hell had dressed her? She wasn't always the most practical person, but she definitely knew better than to wear a short-sleeved dress on a late autumn morning. _

_Something crunched quietly in the distance, the fog carrying the sound in a rolling wave of eerie echoes. _

_Sarah ran._

_It was instinct that drove her, not fear. Often the two were confused for being one and the same, but it typically wasn't so. Instinct was nothing more than a set of pre-programmed responses to various stimuli, whereas fear was, more often than not, a simple paralysis in the face of the unknown. The sound had not scared her, too many animals lived in the forest for her to fear every unknown noise; instinct had driven her to action though, because her primitive mind had recognized the gentle crackling of a soft-soled shoe shuffling over frostbitten leaves. That the sound could have been made by someone wanting to help her barely crossed her mind; good Samaritans did not _sneak_ up on the people they wished to help._

_It was only then, after her mind had sorted through various possibilities based on the signals it was receiving, that she felt fear. Animals did not wear shoes, therefore it wasn't an animal; people of goodwill tended to announce their presence, therefore it was not someone of goodwill. Someone lurking in the hidden misty depths of the forest had meant to get a closer look at her, and it wasn't likely that their intentions had been all that pure in nature._

_The air around her seemed to erupt into a cacophony of noise. Sarah's steps, made laborious and uneven by the chilling numbness that had settled into her bones, crashed against the frozen leaves and echoed through the fog, bouncing back against unseen trees and rocks until it sounded as though there were a dozen of her fleeing through the woods. Clouds of white raced past her through the darkness while the fine mist lashed at her face and eyes, both of them working together to obscure the path before her. Trees popped up out of the misty ether with a suddenness that was startling, forcing her to joust and weave at a moment's notice, lest she run headfirst into ancient oaks that were thicker around than she was tall. _

_But beneath the noise she made—through the thunderous slaps of her feet against the frozen earth, the frantic scrambling around and over the rugged terrain, the explosive breaths that sawed in and out of her dainty chest with a frightening intensity—was the gentle and sure footwork of that which she was running from. Every second that she spent tripping over a hidden root was one second that they drew closer to her, their movements easy and unhurried. _

_Sarah's footing faltered again, but she refused to slow and angrily tore herself away from the thorny root that had grabbed hold of her ankle. That simple second's inattention cost her dearly; she had continued moving forward while focused on the offending greenery, and out of the mist a great bolder had appeared. By the time her attention refocused it was already too late, and she ran bodily into the massive stone, landing flat on her ass, stunned and bruised._

_A shadow fell over her, and with dread she looked up. Resting delicately upon the crest of the tall rock was the figure of a man, crouched like an animal ready to spring. His form was made indistinct and shadowy by the thick fog, but he was muscled like the lean jaguar and seemed just as deadly. Swallowing, Sarah lifted her head fractionally, hoping to see a face through the heavy mist._

_Brilliant, predatory blue eyes watched her every move._

* * *

As a matter of fact, it _was_ a damn long night. The precious few moments of sleep that she managed to steal were far from restful, plagued as they were by frighteningly vivid dreams. The last one had jolted her out of bed, the memory of those intense blue eyes prickling her skin and sending not entirely unpleasant shivers down her spine. An unnatural cold laced her tired body, forcing her to huddle under the comforting weight of her bedclothes where she couldn't help but remember the dream that had unfolded mere moments ago.

To say that her dream had felt real would have been painfully obvious—hell, she was still cold and her legs ached as though she had run a marathon. The only thing that kept her from deciding that it hadn't been a dream at all was that she wasn't bruised or bloodied anywhere from her frantic flight. More unsettling though, were the emotions that her nocturnal fancy had left in its wake. She wanted to say that she was angry, perhaps even a little terrified, but she wasn't. Oh sure, she was scared—after all, what person wouldn't be after having been followed so easily with only the barest amount of effort—but beneath that was something far more unsettling: the constant, heady pulse of arousal.

And, try though she might, she couldn't be ashamed of it. Something about the situation had echoed through her soul, back to a time when humanity had only been one step removed from their animal brothers, when brides hadn't been proposed to but, rather, won by any means necessary. Warriors from the dawn of history had pursued their chosen women with vigor and zeal, hoping that positive characteristics from the match would go on to make strong babies. There was something unfailingly honest about that, something subtly romantic about a man choosing one woman above all others because he felt that she was simply the best match for him. It wasn't like modern dating at all, where a man chose based on aesthetics and tried to convince a girl that she could do no better through washed-out, re-used words and meaningless gifts; primitive man had shown his woman that he was good enough because he was the one that had caught her.

The chase itself had been a subtle seduction. The misty forest had brought forth pure and primitive instinct while the run had flooded her blood with adrenalin and, therefore endorphins. Endorphins were often attributed to joggers' high, a natural levity that produced a drug-like gaiety. But endorphins, the sneaky little hormone, also found its way into the blood after consuming chocolate and often left people with the feeling of being in love. Granted, it hadn't been chocolate that had gotten her running, but the feeling had still been there, a strange fluke of human chemistry or perhaps a natural adaptation because of the way that mankind had once mated. Running through those trees, high on fear and chemical love, Sarah had felt more alive than ever before. Reckless, perhaps, but the fear hadn't been for her well-being, rather it was the fear of a changing future. It was the same fear that women had been feeling for millennia, knowing that childhood laid at her feet but not quite sure about stepping into full womanhood. A chasing man inherently challenged that feeling because, if he caught her, it meant that babies were on the way and a child could not have children of her own.

Knowing that it had been Jareth chasing her, running through an otherworldly rite that strangely coincided with human rites, wreaked absolute havoc on her senses. Where she was inclined to say that the simple situation had made her horny, blue eyes flashed and lean muscles rippled. Pure stimulation could make a woman pant, but she didn't spread her legs unless she liked the man and really wanted to. And Sarah _really_ wanted to. She had lost her virginity the day before yesterday in whirlwind of mediocrity and disappointment to a boy that she genuinely cared for, and yet it was the man that she viewed as more of a nightmare than a fantasy that had her impossibly ready to try that horizontal dance once more.

The unfairness of life still continued to shock her.

A quick look at the clock told Sarah that she only had ten more minutes before her alarm went off. Having the time to spare, she gave an exultant stretch and muffled a shriek when the motion was mirrored across her belly. In a jerky move she ripped the covers off, only to find that her nightshirt had ridden up over her midriff and the little snake-scarf had curled itself over the exposed skin. If a living scarf hadn't been such a creepy idea, she would have found the scene kind of cute. The little creature raised its ambiguous head, as if to protest the abrupt removal of linen warmth, then gently moved up her side like a flowing liquid before wrapping itself around her arm once more.

"You need a name," she decided suddenly, tired of thinking about the scarf in neutral terms. "Are you a boy?"

It squeezed her arm. In terms of responses, something like that could have been interpreted either way but, despite the fact that it was purple and red—colors that she considered relatively feminine—the snake-scarf carried some strange air of masculinity around it.

"Okay," she mused, getting up to turn her alarm off before the vile thing began its ear-piercing shrill, "how about Fluffy?"

It _bit_ her. She didn't know how, seeing as it had no discernible mouth and, last she had checked, scarves didn't come equipped with teeth.

"All right, not Fluffy," Sarah retracted the joking words quickly, running a finger over whichever part of the creature that was currently soothing the minuscule bite on her arm. "Serin, then."

It pondered this for a moment, projecting an air of deep thought, then gave its gentle squeeze of affirmation.

She was halfway through dressing for another tedious Monday at school when she realized that Serin had no intention of leaving her arm. "You can't come with me," she told him levelly. "It's bad enough that I'll be looking over my shoulders for Jareth, I can't worry about my friends thinking I own a haunted scarf as well."

He let out a tiny hiss, then looped his head under the coils around her arm, forming a bandage of sorts over her bicep. For good measure, he gave her skin a tiny little nip, telling her in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going anywhere. His persistence was a little surprising but, then again, if Jareth really _had_ assigned this job to him, it made perfect sense.

With a sigh Sarah relented, choosing a long-sleeved shirt to cover up the little bundle on her arm. Why were the men in her life so difficult?

School that day was nothing short of torture. The crowded halls seemed to be smaller than ever, bodies pressing in on her until she thought she'd scream. Every flash of blond hair had her jumping and scurrying away, and every glimpse of blue eyes had shivers racing down her spine. Each class seemed to take an eternity, every second making her more aware that she was a sitting duck. By the time lunch rolled around, she was a nervous wreck.

And, as Murphy's Law would have it, that was precisely when her boyfriend caught up with her.

"I missed you this morning," Brad said, leaning down for a quick smooch.

Sarah returned his kiss absently, her eyes constantly sweeping over the cafeteria crowd. For a brief moment she could have sworn that she'd seen a hint of blond hair and naked torso reflected in one of the recessed showcases that lined the walls. And, for the first time in her life, she hoped that was the kid who made a habit of streaking having another one of his 'episodes'.

"Sarah?" Brad made a desperate grab at her attention. _Loudly_.

She grudgingly ripped her eyes away from the crowd and focused on the ginger-haired boy sitting next to her. He had an adorably confused look on his face and, not for the first time, Sarah couldn't help but think her boyfriend emoted like a puppy, all big eyes and head quirks. "I'm sorry," she sighed, "something happened yesterday and it has me on edge a bit."

The minute he frowned she knew she'd said too much. Brad was the innately concerned sort; he always had to know what was bothering people so that he could dispense his sage-like advice. "What happened?" he asked quietly, leaning closer so that the others seated at their table wouldn't hear.

_Lie your ass off,_ the brat provided instantly. It was tempting advice, but guilt was eating at her. Here was the boy that she had given her virginity to, a boy who had been nothing but kind and gentle to her, and yet it was the beast-like Jareth that made her burn with desire. But Jareth, she had begun to realize, was more than she could handle, so she was going to do her best to avoid this little chase of his, which was beginning to make her seem genuinely paranoid. She could lie to Brad about it, but then she would feel even guiltier. Perhaps a watered-down truth? _It's going to bite you in the ass, I guarantee it, _the brat huffed.

"I ran into an old… acquaintance," Sarah said carefully, her head practically on Brad's shoulder so that no one else would hear. "We didn't really part on good terms the first time around and now he's a little… obsessive."

"Is he stalking you?" he asked in that 'indignant boyfriend' tone.

She wanted to say yes—it was the truth after all—but then Brad would feel obligated to protect her. If ever she had heard a bad idea that was it; her gangly redhead would be absolutely powerless in the face of the ruthless Goblin King. Still, the thought of lying to him made her feel bad; they were in a relationship, so he had a right to know, didn't he? Not the whole truth, obviously, since he would never believe it, but the general situation. She waffled. "I don't think so," she replied in a pinched voice, absolutely hating herself, then added, "but you never know."

Great, she was lying to her boyfriend _and_ possibly putting him in danger! And that was completely ignoring the fact that she was on the verge of cheating on the poor boy. It couldn't be healthy to be in a relationship with a nice man while lusting after a bad one.

Brad looped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. "I'm here for you, Sarah," he whispered into her ear, "you don't have to face these things alone."

The hair at the back of her neck stood on end and she felt Serin twitch around her arm. Nerves and guilt ate away at her as she laid her head down on Brad's shoulder. She could practically _feel_ Jareth's eyes on her and, in that moment, she wasn't sure if she was more guilty because she had lied to her boyfriend or if it was because arousal was slowly licking its way through her veins at the simple awareness of her pursuer.

The rest of the day passed in an increasingly slow march, and Sarah began to notice a pattern. Every time Brad was physically affectionate, Serin would rustle and wriggle a little and then she would feel those blue-flame eyes studying her. She never caught sight of Jareth, could never figure out where he was watching her from, but she felt his presence all the same. It was disconcerting that his appearances coincided with the physical intimacy of her relationship, and that thought began to put bad ideas into her head.

What if Jareth hadn't known she was dating? She couldn't decide if that would matter to him because she still wasn't very clear on the nature of this hunt of his, aside from the fact that it had basely sexual overtones. Would it make him jealous that she was already in a relationship? And if he was jealous would that make him dangerous? More and more she was beginning to realize that she didn't know enough about her ethereal hunter to gauge what his thoughts or actions may be. He was the epitome of a wild card and she didn't like the idea of Mr. Wild Card getting anywhere near her boyfriend, who may or may not have been the focus of some otherworldly aggression.

Sarah was about halfway home when she felt a chill race up her spine. The school wasn't far from where she lived, so she had made a habit of walking home, but her typical route took a shortcut through the park. Generally speaking, it wasn't much of a park—more of a glorified public garden, really—but the east side, the side she went through, was different. That side of the park was lined with towering, sturdy trees and the grass and flowers ran rampant, the landscapers having long since left the wilder area to its own devices. Usually she reveled in the quiet solitude of nature simply being where it wanted to, but the minute her feet had crossed that murky border from old city sidewalk to living forest, something had felt _different_.

_Older_.

Like, somehow, these weren't the woods she knew but, rather, the woods that had come before them. Like she had stepped through time and the little town that she lived in was no longer waiting at the other end of her little dirt trail.

_Like she was being hunted._

Sarah's breath slammed into her throat, escaping in quick little pants as she took her first cautious step. She had walked this path countless times, knew every inch of it from beginning to end but, despite what her head was telling her, her heart was almost positive that she was about to get lost. The trees weren't where she remembered and there seemed to be infinitely more of them. The path looked the same though, so she took her second step, and then her third. It was around the fourth step that the fog rolled in and she began to panic.

This was turning into her dream, only it was a comfortable afternoon rather than a bitterly cold predawn.

A shadow darted through the mists, tearing a gasp from her throat. "I know you're there, Jareth," she said, fighting down the adrenaline rush.

"Of course you know I'm here," he teased, his voice echoing from all around her. "But the point of being chased is not to _know_ your pursuer is there, Sarah, it's simply to avoid being caught."

She began a brisk walk along her trail, not wanting to leave its simple comfort.

Another shadow dashed in front of her. "You're surprisingly bad at this," he mocked.

Sarah was in a all-out run by now, flying over her path as quickly as she could, hoping to reach the end—assuming there still _was_ an end—before Jareth reached her. With every step she took she remembered the forest from her dreams: the dark mists, the ancient trees, the bitter cold that numbed her limbs, and the burning arousal that had heated her core. Suddenly, a strong arm snagged her around the waist from behind, drawing her hard against the body that was at her back. She desperately tried to control her breathing as a head settled over her shoulder, so very close to that spot on her neck that Jareth had already claimed as his own. Blond hair tickled the side of her face as she struggled to get away, but her captor was inhumanly strong.

Jareth chuckled deep in his throat. "I've already let you go once, Sarah," he whispered in her ear, "I won't give you many more opportunities to get away."

Oh god, the dream _had_ been real.

"Why are you letting me go at all?" she asked, curious to the answer, but hoping the question wouldn't make him change his mind.

"I'm trying to give you a sporting chance, little lover," he murmured, "but you don't quite seem to grasp the dynamics of being hunted. I won't always be so obvious in the future, nor will I always choose to chase in a forest, so consider yourself warned." He nuzzled her throat while his arm pressed her closer. For a split second, his tongue darted out to that spot on her neck that he seemed so fascinated with…

And then he was gone, his weight and support abruptly falling away, leaving Sarah disoriented while the fog disappeared and the trees somehow became familiar again.

The afternoon passed slowly but in a fashion that could have been considered relatively normal. Toby trundled through the house, making messes everywhere he went, Karen following in his wake in a vain effort to keep her home clean, and her father stayed out of sight until dinner. Sarah, for her part, was torn between finding comfort in the familiarity of the situation and being worried that relaxing would simply be foolish. Jareth wouldn't barge into her home when her whole family was there, would he?

She didn't know, and that kept her tense enough that even Karen had briefly asked if something was wrong. By the time night rolled around, she felt like a tautly stretched rubber band, ready to snap if strained any further. She had a feeling that sleep, if it came at all, would be less than restful, and the gloomy climb up to her room did little to settle her nerves.

Sarah closed her door, kept the lights off, and wandered blindly to her bed where she flopped down tiredly, clothes and all. She wasn't safe here any more than she was safe anywhere, but her room still felt like a haven. It was her territory, a place that reflected her desires and dislikes from every corner; it was a place where she could relax and be the Sarah that she wanted to be. Funny how, for as much as he complicated her life, she'd never had to pretend for Jareth; she rather got the feeling that he wouldn't have accepted anything less than the real her.

She snuggled her pillows, burying her face in the soft fabric. This day had been one of the most jarring she had ever experienced, and relaxing now probably wasn't a good idea but it felt wonderful to just curl up into bed and breathe slowly.

She jumped a mile high when the phone rang, and again when Karen shouted that it was Brad.

Sarah half sat up, her hand fumbling out into the darkness, and managed to grab the phone on her nightstand. "Hello?" her voice came quiet and just a little husky from her lethargic rest.

"Hey, sweetheart," Brad answered. "You weren't sleeping, were you?"

She closed her eyes and laid back down. "No," she answered, almost wishing she had been. Something in her was convinced that sleeping wouldn't be an option tonight.

"Good, I want to talk about that guy you mentioned during lunch," even through the faint static of the phone, she could hear the concern in his voice.

Sarah let out a heavy sign. "Look Brad, I appreciate that you want to help, but I really don't think you should get involved."

"We're dating, aren't we?" came his indignant question.

"Yes, we're dating," she answered calmly, "but I'd still feel more comfortable if you kept out of this."

"At least tell me what the guy looks like," Brad pleaded, "just in case you don't see him; two sets of eyes are better than one."

"He's not exactly –_eep_!" she cut off with a startled shriek.

"_What_? What happened?" Brad asked desperately from the other line.

Sarah didn't answer him. A soft touch was trailing up her thighs, caressing her through the material of her pants. Her hands shot out to stop the attack, but nothing was there; her palms rested flat against her legs, and yet the sensations continued.

A chill rolled up her spine as the phantom hands began to massage at her tense leg muscles.

"_Sarah_?!" she picked up the abandoned phone in time to hear her boyfriend's increasingly panicked questions.

She had two options now: one, she could end her conversation with Brad as quickly as possible or, two, she could grin and bear it. The second option seemed damn near suicidal—she needed to get out of her room, _fast_—but the first option would only make Brad more concerned, perhaps to the point where he would actually come over to see her, and the last thing she needed was her boyfriend getting involved with the Goblin King. So, despite the fact that it went against every instinct that was screaming to life inside her, Sarah stayed where she was and went with option two.

"Spider," she stuttered out, feeling like a fool, "it was just a spider that crawled over my leg."

One of the ghostly hands pinched her hip.

"Oh," he sounded relieved. "You had me really worried there for a moment."

"Sorry." Sarah bit her lip to hold off another shriek as a second pair of hands trailed over her shoulders and began to knead at the flesh of her breasts. A brief silence ensued after that, in which she tried to maintain even and quiet breathing.

"So, you were saying…?" Brad finally prompted.

"W-well, he's not exactly easy to find," she stuttered as a third pair of phantom hands played over her quivering stomach. "The sort of person who can hide really well, y-you know?"

"Still," he pressed, "the man's not invisible. What does he look like?"

"He, uh," she drew in a shaky breath and stood up, hoping that motion might stop the hands. "He has blond hair; kind of l-long and shaggy."

The hands continued their ceaseless teasing as Sarah paced up and down her room. A fourth pair began to rake gentle nails over her back as the pair at her thighs began to flirt just a little bit higher; suddenly, her knees felt like giving out. She felt like she was burning, the skin under her clothes craving intimate contact.

She swallowed roughly. "He's got b-blue eyes, his skin is really pale, and he's tall."

Something flashed briefly in the corner of her room and a fifth and sixth pair of hands began to unbutton her clothes. Adrenaline slammed through her blood, demanding action, and mixed with her arousal, bringing all of her to painful hypersensitivity.

"Is this freaking you out, sweetheart?" her boyfriend asked quietly. "You sound really nervous."

Her nerves were dancing, crying out against her motionlessness. "Brad," her voice cracked, "I have to go. The spider's still in my room." She hung up before he had a chance to offer his goodbyes or point out that she'd never had arachnophobia before, then quickly dashed toward her door.

But luck had already proven itself not to be with Sarah this night; the moment her hand closed around the doorknob, Jareth's rich and mesmerizing voice whispered out of the shadowy corners of her room. "'I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high. Will you rest upon my little bed?' said the spider to the fly."

It wasn't the first time she'd heard that children's rhyme used in a sexual context and it probably wouldn't be the last either, but she'd never heard Jareth murmur those ambiguous lines, and it was wreaking absolute havoc with her already over-wound body. The phantom hands had kept up their steady pace, neither ceasing nor giving more; her shirt had been completely unbutton and the snap and zipper of her jeans had been undone. Her entire body seemed frozen in place, able to do nothing but receive pleasure, as she stared torturously at her motionless hand; she wanted to leave the room, to have an open place to escape to and yet, at the same time, something in her craved being around Jareth. She was torn between common sense and desire.

The inner brat howled with laughter.

"Why won't you leave me alone?" Sarah asked quietly.

She could hear him moving behind her. "I could have asked you the same question for the past four years," he whispered in her ear. "Now I'm more inclined to ask why you're not running."

"Because you keep surprising me," she answered without thinking.

He snorted. "That's a hunter's right, if not his duty."

Sarah resolutely kept him at her back. It was strange to have him so close to her and yet not feel his touch, only the caress of the magic that he controlled. "It's still not fair," she replied, her voice husky and laced with obvious arousal. "It's not like I can just pick up and go," she explained, whimpering a little when one of the ghostly hands at her thighs slipped inside her open jeans. "I've got responsibilities that I can't ignore and no money with which to go anywhere."

"So you're saying that, in the interest of _fairness_," Jareth drawled the word in obvious disdain, "I should level the field?"

Her breasts felt tight and swollen, the muscles of her belly were clenching convulsively, and the intimate flesh between her thighs was aching with empty fire, all of which added up to a state of physical torture that deafened her to his strangely phrased question. "Yes," she agreed on a moan.

He laughed, a dark and seductive sound that rumbled over her shoulder and left her knees feeling like jello. Abruptly, his warmth disappeared and with it went the phantom hands.

Lust and adrenaline swam through Sarah, making a hazy mess of her thoughts, but the sudden departure of those teasing hands was like a splash of cold water. Her thoughts cleared a little from the intense arousal, enough to realize that she was no longer in her bedroom.

Mountains rose up around her, beautiful and forbidding, laced with ancient trees and jutting boulders. A fine mist hung in the air, not thick enough to be a fog and not heavy enough to be a rain. The setting sun pierced through the mist, casting the surrounding nature in golden and sapphire shadows. It wasn't quite like the dream she'd had, or the encounter on her way home from school, but the similarities were enough to make her pulse race. For a moment she simply stood in place, frozen like a scared deer, but she couldn't feel her hunter anywhere. That didn't mean anything though; Jareth had proven, if nothing else, that he was more than capable of showing up when she least expected him.

A primitive urge reared up within her, a visceral desire to search for someplace to hide, to seek out cover and see if she could out-wait her hunter—she already knew from experience that she had little hope of out-running him. The problem was deciding which way to go: up the mountains, or down them? Higher up there could be caves, or at least crevices to settle down in, but lower down there would be trees and dense foliage that she could use for camouflage. A cave would provide shelter, but she could easily find herself trapped if Jareth picked up her trail, whereas a forest would at least allow her to move about freely. Shelter would have been a welcome reprieve from the chilly mist, but it was a chance she wasn't willing to take; the forest may not be able to protect her from the elements very well, but it gave her complete freedom of movement.

Her mind made up, Sarah carefully began to make her way down the steeply sloped mountainside, trying to reach the quickly thickening woods as fast as possible. The trees were spread quite a bit apart where Jareth had left her, and the lack of cover made her nervous, especially taking his owl form into consideration—she was painfully visible from above and a raptor like the owl would spot her in a heartbeat.

The last few slivers of light were fading from the sky by the time she reached the forest proper, and her newly reclaimed instinct was sending her conflicting signals. Part of her was demanding that she set up camp and rest until it was light out—even if that meant just climbing up a tree to keep away from the nocturnal predators—but another part was stridently arguing against stopping—she needed to keep moving if she was to have any hope of evading Jareth. Eventually weary muscles won the battle; she had been through the longest day of her life before even being taken from her room, and the trek down the mountain had only exhausted her further.

It took her a could of tries to actually make it up the tree she finally chose as her resting place for the night—she hadn't climbed a tree since she'd been a kid and was sorely out of practice. A sense of accomplishment flooded her when she managed to settle on the thick branch that was probably a good fifteen feet off the ground, but it was a hollow victory. She desperately wanted to build a fire, both for the warmth it would provide and for the human desire to bathe in light during a time of uncertainty, but a fire would attract unwanted attention and was therefore out of the question. Sarah knew she wasn't fooling herself though, even without the fire Jareth probably wouldn't have a hard time finding her, and the tree, despite it's thick covering of leaves, wouldn't protect her from truly careful eyes.

_This is just sad_, the brat grumbled. _You were on the verge of orgasmic bliss not so long ago, and now you're up a tree; that's just wrong._

"You're the one that got me into this mess," she hissed quietly. "If it hadn't been for you, I never would have been in his closet in the first place!"

_Oh honey, you would have cracked sooner or later; you're too passionate of a dreamer to ignore the impulse forever. Besides, I _am_ you_, the brat laughed.

Sarah was about to make a caustic reply when something rustled. Every muscle in her body seemed to freeze, her lungs seizing as her heart stuttered to a silent murmur. She held herself perfectly still, straddled over her branch, as the sound grew louder. At first she worried that perhaps these woods had large cats or bears—creatures that would not be deterred by trees in the slightest—then she worried that it was a predator of a different sort entirely. A gentle glow pierced through the night, a silvery-golden light that reminded her of fireflies. The rustling intensified as the glow became brighter, sneaking its way through the denseness of the forest.

And then, suddenly, he was there: Jareth, wearing only rough looking pants and a pair of soft boots, surrounded by the pearly luminescence, as though lit from within, the runic designs blazing like a black fire across his brow and pectoral. The green streaks in his hair seemed to blend into the night-darkened foliage around him, a quality that reaffirmed his wildness. He drew close to her tree and stopped, his head lifting ever so slightly as though scenting the air. Whatever his senses relayed seemed to satisfy him though, because he dropped into a graceful crouch at the base of her hiding place, calling forth a pack from thin air.

Sarah's mouth went dry as she watched him sort through his supplies; he seemed to have an inordinate amount of rope, and that worried her. The image of his bed flashed back into her mind: a silken expanse littered with restraints; she had joked to Karen that this chase was a parody of sexual domination, but she was beginning to suspect that she hadn't really been that far off the mark. He also had one or two hunting knives and a couple of bags of miscellaneous powders, all of which made her nervous because she had no idea what he intended to do with them.

A cheery little fire leapt to life as Jareth settled down, a whetstone in one hand and a wicked looking blade in the other. The rhythmic sound of metal sliding against stone whispered through the leaves, unsettling her as she fought to stay motionless upon her perch.

And here was the blatant irony of life: something about the methodical sound of a blade singing over stone had her blood heating. The fact that the knife might be meant for her never occurred to Sarah. An image had risen within her mind—the murky impression of a warrior, blade raised high, ready to defend what was his. It was primal and unforgiving, and yet it spoke to something within her, to the dreamer that was unsatisfied with normal life, to the reckless brat that loved to court danger. A fire started low in her belly as she took a moment to really think about the situation. This wasn't a casual romp, or Jareth would have easily ended it already; he wanted her to fight but he intended to win, and the performance in her bedroom earlier made it abundantly clear what he intended to claim as his prize. What made her burn all the hotter, though, was the strange sense of permanence that the situation suddenly reeked of, despite her mind's insistence that you couldn't keep someone like Jareth.

But could _she_ be kept?

She had to admit that, in reverse, it was an entirely different statement, and one that seemed completely probable. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. He had called this hunt a tradition and it had made her think of the various folktales that she had heard over the years; they all had one thing in common: when the Others won, the humans were rarely ever heard from again. He clearly had a prize in mind, but did he also have a timeframe? Was she going to be doomed to lust after one man for the rest of her life, or was she in danger of simply being spirited away from the world she knew?

The fire in her belly didn't care; it wanted one thing only: satisfaction. She had lost her virginity two days ago—_had it really only been two days? It seemed so much longer!_—and the experience hadn't touched her in even the most elemental of ways. It had been abysmally disappointing, at best, and the primal woman within her recognized a strong mate within Jareth. She wanted to have pleasure that would leave her shaking in the aftermath, and she knew that he could give her that. Already, despite the fact that they had only shared the smallest touches, he had aroused more desire and pleasure in her than anyone ever had or, she feared, ever would.

She was damned if she was caught, and damned if she wasn't caught. It was a struggle that had been plaguing women for millennia, and one that her baser instincts would inevitably win. Her body recognized him as a well-suited match, even if her mind wasn't nearly so certain and, at their basest, man was an animal—just like the wolf or the horse—and nature would have out.

Jareth put the whetstone to one side and inspected his hunting knife carefully, turning the blade to catch the light of the fire as he viewed it from every angle. Satisfied with its apparent sharpness, he put the stone away, strapped the knife to his thigh, and quietly faded into the darkness.

Sarah panicked; she didn't like not being able to see him, especially when she was coming to realize that she didn't know him nearly as well as she had thought. Had he vanished into the forest to hunt for dinner and, if so, how long would he be gone? She found herself faced with two choices: one, she could stay in her tree, praying that he wouldn't look up, and spend the night in acute physical torture; or, two, she could use this opportunity to shimmy down the tree and scamper off into the night before he came back, despite the fact that she would run the very real risk of facing off with him in the unknown wilds.

Damned if she did, damned if she didn't.

In the end it was more of a fall than a shimmy—she was just glad that she didn't land in the fire—and swore never to take up tree climbing again. Sarah stood on shaky knees, hoping nothing was too badly bruised; she wanted to stay by the fire for a little to soak up some warmth in the rapidly cooling night, but she had no way of knowing how long Jareth would be gone. With a longing look at the small puddle of light, she ventured off into the whispering woods, straining her ears for any noise that could indicate she was being followed. Her real problem on the ground now was knowing whether Jareth was in front of her or behind her. She knew the general direction that he had set off in, but that didn't mean much of anything; he could have doubled-back or taken a sharp turn away from that area.

Serin rustled in his resting place over her arm, and some instinct forced her to stop moving. The trees were dense with leaves and the night was cloudy, but enough moonlight trickled through for her to recognize what was at her feet, what the small snake-scarf had somehow known was there. A snare. Primitive, made mostly of sticks, but effective for trapping small animals.

"I mean to catch myself a rabbit, and instead I catch a woman," Jareth whispered into her ear, the heat of his body suddenly searing her back.

Sarah didn't even pause to think about it, or to acknowledge the burning in her veins at his voice; she jolted away from him, jumping over the small snare as she made a mad dash through the dark forest. He laughed, a wicked, exultant sound that had her speeding up as much as possible. Trees danced out of the night, appearing before her with a stealth that was almost unavoidable, and the mist thickened into a rain, slicking the ground and soaking her to the bone.

As she slipped and slid over the muddy earth, avoiding roots and rocks as best she could, she finally conceded that something was bothering her: this chase was different from the previous two. She couldn't hear him, whereas during the first chase she had clearly been able to hear his sure steps behind her, and she couldn't see him, when she had during the second chase. Both clues were denied to her senses this time; she heard nothing but her own thundering steps and the steady beat of the rain, and she saw nothing but the brief glimmer of the moon trying to break through the clouds. She knew she was being chased, she could feel it in the adrenaline that surged through her veins, but she had no way of knowing how close he was. A root caught her foot and she could have sworn that she felt his breath on the back of her neck as she pulled free, making a sharp turn and running wildly in a new direction. Moments later, a thorny branch caught her shirt, ripping her sleeve clean off and exposing poor Serin to the chilly rain, and she thought she might have heard a quick inhalation—that strange scenting of the air that he had done earlier when choosing his spot to rest. She shoved on, pushing herself mercilessly, knowing that being close enough to hear him breath was much _too_ close—and to think, just moments before she had been worried that she couldn't hear anything!

Serin slithered down her arm, wrapping himself around her wildly flailing wrist. She would have felt bad for the creature if he hadn't then flashed out and wrapped his other half around a passing branch. Sarah was jerked to an abrupt stop, panting as she desperately pulled against the snake-scarf. He refused to give; if anything, he merely tightened the distance that was between her and the tree, exhibiting a strength that was far beyond her own.

"That's not fair!" Sarah screamed, panicked at Serin's sudden betrayal.

A strong arm wrapped around her waist from behind. "I gave you a head start, let you go multiple times, and changed the setting of our little chase, all for your benefit. How is _this_ not fair?" Jareth asked, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

She shivered, the warmth of his chest bleeding through her soaking shirt. "You can't set a trap that I have absolutely no hope of avoiding; that's cheating!"

"No," he chuckled, "that's winning." His free hand shot out to grasp the tautly stretched form of Serin, who instantly released the branch and wrapped around the length of Jareth's arm instead, practically tying her wrist-to-wrist with him.

"It's still not fair," she whispered though, honestly, she couldn't figure out why she had expected him to play fair; he never had in the past, after all.

"No, I'll tell you what isn't fair," he growled, his lips diving toward her neck until he was rumbling the words right over that spot that he always seemed so preoccupied with. "Not fair was being struck upside the head with the epitome of my desires when you were at an age that was too young to appreciate my attention." He finally staked his claim on that spot between neck and shoulder, biting the skin with his wickedly sharp teeth and then soothing the wound with his tongue. "Not fair is being temped and teased for four years only to find out that some pathetic mortal boy got to you first."

Lust, already at a steady simmer within her blood, roared to a level that was bordering pain from his bite. She could almost feel the magic of his touch seeping through the bite he had left, like an aphrodisiac-laced kiss. The skin of her neck felt as though it were on fire, despite the constant fall of the cold rain. "Brad?" she asked blankly, trying to ignore the lazy heat that was stealing over her.

He snarled. "You call him boyfriend but I guarantee, little lover, that he never pleased you the way I will."

Sarah admitted that she should have felt some kind of guilt at that statement—they were, after all, talking about a boy that she was still technically dating while on the verge of having sex—but she was too preoccupied with the hand tracing small circles over her belly; the gesture was as soothing as it was arousing. "That's why I started to leave you alone, you know," the brat in her taunted him, "so that somebody else could get to me."

Jareth snarled again, a sound so vicious that it almost made her shiver more than the tongue that was again lapping over the bite. Was it just her imagination, or was that spot getting hotter?

"Brad Mikals took my virginity two days ago, and do you know what it made me feel, Jareth?" She was playing with fire, teasing a beast that was already wound to the snapping point.

His teeth scraped over the bite once more, but the pain that she should have felt at the gesture was absent, just as it had been the first time. Instead it was as though liquid lust spread from his lips to infect every region of her that it could invade, sliding through the wound and curling around her body like the truest of conquerors.

"Absolutely nothing," she sighed, some part of her still mourning for the failed passion. Jareth paused and she could sense his brow quirking in silent question; it almost made her laugh. "Oh, I felt the penetration, but that's all it was. A simple interlocking of flesh that promised so much and delivered nothing. I was beyond disappointed; I wanted everything that the seduction had promised. But it was _your_ seduction that had made those promises, wasn't it?" A knot tightened low in her belly, an empty pressure that demanded satisfaction. "That's why I came back; I wanted something to remind me that I _could_ feel passion."

His lips pulled away from the side of her throat, but he didn't answer her declaration. Instead he turned her to face him, using the arm that Serin had bound them together with to trap her against his chest. He stared at her for a protracted moment, his blue eyes unreadable as he studied her own green gaze. She wasn't sure what he found there, but it seemed to please him because his azure-flame stare lit up with wicked pleasure. His lips quirked into a predatory grin seconds before they crashed down upon her own.

A hundred thoughts flashed through Sarah's mind—_she was cheating on Brad; she was crushed up against the chest of a creature that most people thought only existed in dreams and nightmares; she should be struggling against Jareth, not meeting his touch; anything that happened now was bound to create more trouble than her stint through the Labyrinth ever had_—then he nipped at her lower lip and her mind went absolutely blank. Her mouth opened to his urgings and he instantly invaded the territory beyond her lips. His tongue swept in, arrogant and challenging, and she caught her first taste of him. For years she had known that he smelled like sex and cinnamon, but she had never guessed that he would _taste_ like the warm spice as well. And yet the flavor stole over her, curling around her tongue and heating her like nothing ever had. It was like a sip of ambrosia: one little taste and her quivering body demanded more.

She surged against him, coming alive at his touch, as though her whole life had been lived through a gray haze that only he had the power to lift away. Frustration laced her every jerk and shudder: she wanted to wrap her arms around him, but he had both of them trapped to her sides; she wanted pleasure enough to make her scream, but he was ruthlessly controlling the kiss, making sure that she only received what he deigned to give. When he pulled away it was much too soon for her liking; his taste was heavy on her tongue and she wanted more. His spicy flavor had spread through her, like the heat from his bite, lacing the adrenaline that pumped in her blood. She felt weak-kneed and frustrated, his every move priming her for the carnal promises that lurked behind his brilliant eyes.

Jareth didn't wait for her to recover from the kiss; he sat on the ground, pulling her down to straddle his lap, and for the first time she noticed that they were back at his small camp by the tree. The little fire cast long shadows and didn't seem affected by the rain, dancing on the small breeze and keeping the surrounding ground dry.

Her hands shot out to his shoulders as he leaned forward a bit, a moan escaping her at the small amount of friction his move had caused. "Do you know why you're never supposed to kiss an Other, Sarah?" he asked quietly, his voice low and husky as his gaze darted between her eyes and her lips.

She shook her head, squirming a little bit when his hands clamped over her hips, preventing her from rubbing against him like her body was demanding. Even through the fog of her lust she had to admit that she had never heard any story of the sort; she had heard and learned never to eat their food, but not that kisses were forbidden as well.

He grinned darkly. "It is because, very much like a snake, we have venom. To certain creatures it would be deadly, but to humans? It is the purest and most addictive of aphrodisiacs; a hormone so powerful that, once it's in your blood, it never truly leaves."

The preternatural heat that was weighing her down suddenly made sense; the chase had warmed her up, but it was Jareth's very chemistry that made her burn. He had bitten her both to stake his claim and to inject his strange hormone into her blood; his kiss had been as much for pleasure as it had been to get her addicted to his taste. Now she was straddling his hips, craving stimulation more and more as the seconds ticked by, whipped higher and higher into sexual frenzy as he merely talked while the potent chemical worked its way through her body. She had an awful suspicion that, given enough time away from stimulation, her pride would be mercilessly beaten and she would beg for his touch.

"Relief is within the hormone itself," he continued, still denying the instinctive rhythm that her hips were trying to engage. "It is both venom and anti-venom. To find satisfaction you must have more of it, but the more you have of it, the more you'll crave it." He held up one of the bags of powder that she had seen him sorting through earlier. "This is a concentrated form of the chemical. You can choose to go home now, and I will give this, _and only this_, to you; it won't last forever, but the choice is yours."

She whimpered, both hating and adoring that he would allow her a way out before things went too deep. Unfortunately, their definitions of too deep differed greatly.

"I was your villain once before," he whispered, rolling his hips gently underneath her. "Would you like me to be your incubus now?"

Even when he was offering her an escape he didn't play fair.

"This isn't enough?" she asked, indicating his proffered satchel.

"Barely enough to get you through the year, if used at a sparing and steady rate," he answered.

Sarah swallowed hard; her skin felt tight and swollen, still tingling from the tiny thrust Jareth had given her. "But I wouldn't, would I?"

"No," he agreed, a smile playing about his lips. "It would take a larger and more frequent dose to quell your hunger every time."

"How long would it really last me?" Her fingers tightened on his shoulders.

He shrugged, rocking against her softly once more. "That depends on how hard you find it to control the hunger. But, I assure you, once it's gone you will find yourself in acute sexual agony that no amount of stimulation could ease."

She sucked in a breath, trying to move against him but his hands still held her down. "And if I didn't take it?"

Jareth hissed. "Your decision is final, Sarah. Binding. This isn't a dream that you wake up from, come the morning, and I intend to take full advantage. I've caught you, trial by hunt, do you accept my claim or do I send you home?"

It was a dirty trick, the trap he'd spun around her. He offered to let her go, but made it clear that the fight would never end; her other choice was to stay and let him finish what he'd started, but it would be a permanent arrangement. Either way, her life would be turned upside-down, so did it really matter what she chose? The bag danced tauntingly in front of her, she could take it and try to stabilize her life as best as possible, avoid complications with Jareth and go back to Brad. Her mind surged with the intimate images of her and Brad together; sweet and unsatisfying, would she doom herself to a lifetime of that if she chose to leave?

Her body wailed in agony at the thought. She had never been so aroused in her life; this wasn't the sort of passion that her boyfriend, or any mortal man, could light within her. It was Jareth's gift alone, and if she left him now she would never get the satisfaction that she wanted, never experience the sensuality that she dreamed of. She had always been drawn to him, even when she had been too young to truly understand what he offered; some part of her had simply recognized a kindred spirit, someone who was searching for something that was just outside of his grasp. For four years she had obsessed over him, unable to let go of the striking figure he had posed from her memories; even when she had tried to distance herself from the fantasy, the dark corners of her mind had still seethed over him, still viewed the normal world and everything in it with disdain. She could have that dream now, at a definite cost, but then nothing was ever free.

Sarah licked her lips nervously as she searched Jareth's eyes. It was hard to mistake his very male arousal, to miss the honest determination that blazed in his sapphire eyes. They both wanted the same thing; was she brave enough to take it?

The inner brat laughed at that question and leaned down to brush her lips against his own. It was a soft kiss at first, a questioning exploration, as though her mind were taking the small contact as a trial run before she made a real decision. But she already _had_ made her decision, and within scant moments the kiss deepened, became harder and more demanding as the lust within her reached a frenzied height.

The world melted around them, fading from the wet forest to Jareth's bedroom. He stood them up and broke the kiss, staring down at her for a moment, then spun her around to face the bed. It was just as imposing now as it had been the day before. It was a monstrous creation of solid wood framing with metal accents; silk and velvet stretched from all corners, giving off an air of welcoming luxury. But leather, silk, and rope twined around the bedposts, wrist restraints hid amid the plush pillows, and even an ankle restraint or two lazed carelessly at the foot of the bed.

"Take a good look at it Sarah," Jareth whispered into her ear, one hand caressing the length of her jaw so that she couldn't look away. "This is your future; are you absolutely certain you want it?"

* * *

**Epilogue**

"I'm really sorry, Brad."

The ginger-haired teen gave her a sad but knowing smile. "I always had a feeling it would come to this," he replied. "Even when we were kids you were like moonlight, Sarah: I could catch you, but I couldn't keep you."

Sarah fought hard to push down her guilt. In a matter of hours most of her dreams had come true, but to achieve them she'd walked all over her poor _ex_-boyfriend. She owed him at least this much, an apology if not an explanation.

"He must be one hell of a guy," Brad murmured.

She laughed. "He's an ass, but he definitely grows on you."

An awkward silence stretched between them.

"I don't regret dating you, Brad," she finally said, "you're one of the best friends I've ever had, but… Jareth has haunted me for years, and it's just not something I can run from anymore." She didn't even want to try; her life would change in countless ways, but she was done hiding. "I'll be around," she continued, "but probably not much, so I guess this is goodbye."

He gave her a tight hug, looking like there was so much he wanted to say but couldn't put into words.

Sarah's chest felt tight as she turned away from him. She had walked into the situation with her eyes open, so couldn't say that she hadn't known how much goodbyes would hurt. Still, some part of her felt rotten for doing it, especially to someone as sweet as Brad.

He didn't offer a goodbye in return and she was already off his porch and halfway to the street before he spoke. "How did it happen?"

She smiled to herself. "Let me offer you some advice: never nose through a Goblin King's closet."

* * *

A/N 1: This thing totally went off on its own tangent and ended up being three times the size that I originally planned. You know, as a writer, sometimes I really just have to wonder how my brain can decide one thing while my hands decide another. This is the longest single one-shot I've ever written, and the longest single-sided narrative as well. (P.S.- The phantom hands are a blatant homage to Daemon Sadi, just, you know… less malicious.)

This short story/chapter is dedicated to my Harem sisters for taking a look at the first half for me… and because I feel bad about taking so long getting the second half finished. Sorry for the wait, my lovelies!

A/N 2: While wandering through the Labyrinth fandom I noticed a strange lack of AU stories; there were many potential sequels and alternate endings, but very few stories that simply took the characters and dropped them into another time and place. I think that's a shame and, after toeing the murky borders of alternate universes while writing Bodice Ripper, I decided to do this series of short-stories.

First of all, let me say that, as a series meant to be dedicated to AUs, this is a shaky start. This particular story would better fall under the category of potential sequel, but I have two reasons for doing it. 1) Since the Labyrinth fandom is so thin on AUs, I figured it would probably be a good idea to have one story that is a concession to the standards and to ease people into the series. 2) It won the poll with an outstanding 26 percent of the votes.

I'm going to create a new poll at the end of every chapter/story with the titles of the other stories I have planned for this series; I was planning to just leave the original poll open for the whole duration, but I keep thinking up new stories to add in. Your voting is purely for the sake of order, since I intend to write them all, so if you have a favorite you'd better vote for it, otherwise it may not get written for quite some time. The top vote is what gets written next, and I probably won't be taking previous polls into account, so make sure you express your opinion while you can. (The new poll is already up for the running on the next story!) And, if you have any suggestions you'd like to share for future stories then, by all means, feel free to contact me.

Now, on a more technical note, I have this to say: This series is a side project for me because, right now, Listen For Thunder is my main concern. I will do my best to update both, but LFT takes priority, so I can't say that this series will follow any sort of timetable. On top of that, each chapter is its own story, which means they require more thought and are likely to be longer than my standard chapter, so they will take longer to write (this story took me upwards of three months to complete). Please be patient with me.

If anyone has made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read all that!

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own the Labyrinth or any of the characters thereof. The phantom hands, and Daemon Sadi for that matter, of the Black Jewels Series, belong to Anne Bishop. The poem "The Spider and the Fly" was written by Mary Howitt. The idea of hormone laced saliva was borrowed from Lora Leigh's Breeds series.


	2. Never Sit On A Werewolf, part one

_**The Never Series**_

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she just wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

* * *

Never Sit On A Werewolf

Part One.

"So here he was, running this feather absentmindedly up and down my leg, and looking at the can a whip cream with a contemplative expression. I just wanted to scream, 'Do it, already!' but that devilish look was creeping onto his face, and that look _always_ means trouble."

"Then what happened?"

"I woke up."

"Damn it!" Sarah glared at the phone in her hand.

Meg laughed, not bothering to cover the sound. "If you're going to live vicariously through others, you might want to make friends with some people that are actually dating," she managed between giggles.

Sarah glared harder, knowing now that her friend had been stringing her along throughout the whole story.

"_Or_," Meg drew out the word, something that always made the dark-haired woman suspicious, "you could find yourself a boyfriend, girlie."

This time she sighed. It was always the same argument between them. Meg never seemed to care much about her own dateless status, but it bothered her that Sarah was alone. 'The difference being that, out of the two of us, I'm the one who actually wants a boyfriend,' she thought to herself. Meg was content to be alone, _"That's my lot in life,"_ she had once explained. But it drove her nuts, absolutely batty, that Sarah burned for something more than the life of a spinster and wasn't getting it.

"After three consecutive good-for-nothings and a divorce, the last thing I want is to get involved with anyone," she finally replied. And it was true, in a way. She didn't want all the heartbreak and the stress that came with letting a man into her life.

"But you miss the companionship, don't you?" Meg guessed.

Unfortunately, that was exactly the problem. Sarah wanted the comfort of a man without any of the upkeep. "Maybe I should just get myself a cat," she mused.

The woman on the other end snorted. "You live alone in that creepy old Victorian, Sarah. People are going to start thinking you're a crazy cat lady. At least get something a little less spinsterish."

She frowned, "Like a dog, you mean?"

Meg shrugged, "Loyalty and unflagging affection; that's what you want, isn't it?"

"Yes, but preferably in my own species," Sarah replied, looking around her home and trying to convince herself that it wasn't really _that_ creepy. It was just… faded. The old Victorian had been left alone for a long time but it wasn't a lost cause, it just needed some fresh paint and a little TLC.

"Beggars can't be choosers, honey. You're the one who refuses to look for companions of the human variety, which definitely has a way of limiting your options, so you might as well compromise for one of our four footed brothers," Meg sighed.

Sarah stuck her tongue out at the phone, it was childish but it made her feel better. "I don't know why I even brought it up, I know I'd never actually get a pet. They need too much."

"Speaking of parasites," her friend interjected, "where's your ex these days?"

"In a ditch, if I'm lucky," she said before hanging up.

Those last words seemed to echo softly around her home, then silence reigned. And that was the problem with her house: it was too quiet. The Victorian hadn't been meant for silence, it had been built for music and laughter, for people and parties. But the Age of Opulence had died, taking all the life out of the place. Each room stood dark and empty, the vibrant silk wallpapers had faded to the point of dullness, the interesting glass wall fixtures stood empty of candles or light bulbs, and the windows were warped from age. It was apparent that someone had once tried to modernize the place, but they had either not known what they were doing or they had simply not cared enough to complete the project. Electric fittings ran through some of the rooms, allowing for lamps and other appliances, but not all of the rooms; there was no heating or cooling system, in the winters she would had to make use of the many fireplaces and in the summer she was going to open all the windows and pray it didn't get any hotter; as a matter of fact, the only real achievement that had been managed in full was the running water, and even that had a tendency to be a bit touchy.

The Victorian was a hodgepodge, neither modern nor ancient; it was stuck in an era long since past, yet desperately tried to keep up with the times. Perhaps that's what had drawn her to it, the fact that it didn't really seem to fit anywhere. She often felt that way herself, being an independent woman and yet wishing for the courtship of times gone by. To pick among suitors and know that there was not only attraction, but honor as well. That was her real problem with men these days: they had no honor. After so many failed experiences she couldn't quite bring herself to try again, at least not yet, but she did miss the companionship fiercely. Maybe Meg was right; maybe it was time to think about getting a pet.

Something clicked softly against the hardwood floor behind her.

Sarah froze; she normally considered herself a brave woman, willing to face all things head on, but she was almost afraid to turn around. After all, she did live alone in a secluded area, that would make dealing with an intruder problematic.

More clicking, getting closer, a brief scrape as something landed on the back of her sofa, and then… snuffling?

She finally turned around; her intruder was a large dog, resting his front paws on the back of her couch while he sniffed at her. For a minute her eyes darted around, looking for whoever the dog belonged to, but found nothing out of place. "How did you get in here?" she asked him softly.

His head cocked to the side, as though considering her words, then leaned forward to brush his muzzle against her cheek. Sarah quickly reared back, surprising both the dog and herself. He flopped to the ground, once more on all four, and regarded her curiously. For her part, she regarded him suspiciously. She had only had one dog while growing up, and he had already been so old by that point that her only real knowledge of dog behavior was that they slept a lot.

Of course, looking at this dog, she could tell that there were bound to be differences. Appearance alone was enough to marvel at. Merlin had been an average sized sheepdog, with shaggy fur in tones of white and gray. The dog before her was black and white, almost like a husky, but seemed almost too large for the breed; he did have those classic, icy blue eyes, though.

She stood up from the couch and slowly came around to the other side. The dog's tail wagged a few time, but for the most part he stayed still. "I'm warning you, no funny business," she said plainly, then turned her back on him to check all the doors. Every single one was shut and locked, there weren't any broken windows, and there certainly weren't any holes in her foundation large enough for a dog to sneak through. "_How did he get in_?" she wondered once more.

The dog was exactly where she had left him, Sarah noted once she returned to the living room. "All right mister, I don't know where you came from, but it's time that you went back," she said, opening the front door. He immediately sat down and looked away from her, a doggy refusal if she had ever seen one. "I mean it," she pressed, "I don't have what it takes to look after a dog, and I'm sure your owner is missing you." But he didn't have any tags, she noted to herself uneasily. What if he was a stray? "Out," she pointed, trying to shake the thought from her mind.

He simply laid down, a hundred plus pounds of muscle and fur and pure stubbornness.

"I'm not a dog person, I won't take care of you," she threatened; he yawned and began grooming his paws, ignoring her completely. "I'm not kidding," she warned desperately, "if you stay here you'll be on your own."

* * *

Looking back, Sarah now knew that she shouldn't have talked as though staying was an option, because it had only led to trouble. But, then again, how did one reason with a dog anyway? He was stronger than she was and simply wouldn't do anything he didn't want to which, unfortunately, included leaving her house. Her furry intruder had ignored her while she left the front door open—hoping that at some point he would just wander out—but the second she closed it he had snapped to attention, following her wherever she went, trying now and again to get her to pet him. She had done her best to ignore him, to make good on her threat, but he had made sad eyes at her throughout lunch and dinner, and she had caved both times enough to give him a small plate of food. She still hadn't pet him though; as a matter of fact, aside from the few times he had brushed against her, she hadn't touched him at all. She was rather hoping that he would want to leave if she didn't show him any affection. Still, she had made the mistake of feeding him, which had probably only been encouraging from his point of view.

She didn't want to rationalize his presence, didn't want to talk herself into keeping him. For all she knew, he already had an owner and he had just managed to slip his leash. 'No tags,' the thought floated through her mind once more. It was beginning to disturb her because, if he was a stray, would she really have it in her to toss him back onto the streets, or take him to one of those awful shelters? She had a feeling that even _her_ stony heart would waver in that situation. Maybe she wasn't a true-blue animal lover, but she hated the thought of anyone's suffering, even when it was a dog. Still, she hoped that she found his home soon, or that he would simply decide to leave on his own, because she didn't want him around enough to grow on her. Dogs were the worst offenders when it came to quickly securing themselves into people's hearts and lives; if he didn't leave soon she had a feeling he never would.

Sarah sighed and rolled onto her back, bunching up the covers around her hips. She could hear him walking through the house, a quiet sentinel checking every room. Perhaps he had been someone's guard dog, she mused. The muffled clicking of his nails on the hardwood flooring came closer, until he was standing just inside her room. It was an eerie sight, if she were honest with herself; the room was dark and so the parts of him that were black faded into the night, while the parts that were white stood out. It looked as though he were made of shadows and moonlight, ethereal and majestic, standing in front of her door and looking at her with blue eyes that flashed through the darkness.

He stared at her for a few more seconds, as though considering something, then laid on the floor. The furry lump stayed there for at least half an hour, and in a strange way she was comforted by that fact, but in the very second before sleep claimed Sarah she felt him jump up on the bed and settle against her side.

* * *

Sarah was never really aware of entering consciousness. She had been sleeping soundly and then she was simply awake, bothered by the strange notion that she had been awake for quite some time; as though her brain had needed a couple extra moments to catch up with the rest of her. She sighed and rolled over; judging by the darkness of the room it was still night, which meant she still had time to sleep.

Her leg hit an obstruction.

With startling clarity, Sarah realized that the comforting weight of her doggy intruder was gone. Something else was sitting at the foot of her bed, and it wasn't a dog. In a jerky, panicked move she turned the bedside lamp on. Dim light flooded the room, lighting up the bed, but cast only shadows to anything beyond. It was eerie, but so was the situation.

She finally dared a look.

A man sat at the end of her bed, leaning casually against the footboard, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. In that split second as Sarah drew air into her lungs in preparation of an ear-splitting scream, she took in the oddities of the man. He had wild blond hair that glinted silver as it ghosted around his face in exotic falls. And what a face it was! All hard angles and a teasing smirk, his eyes shining a startling blue through the disarray of his bangs. And it was hard to tell with him sitting down, but he looked athletic, powerful but not in a bulky way. He was lean, and she could practically sense the coiled strength that wrapped around the muscles hidden beneath his clothes.

Clothes that made her pause.

Waking up to find a man she didn't know sitting on her bed was strange enough—not to mention terrifying—but waking up to find a man in riding clothes sitting on her bed? That was stranger still. He rested serenely against her footboard, looking for all the world like a man who was about to go out and enjoy a nice horse ride… about two centuries ago. His clothes were dated: high boots with a slight heel, tight breeches, crisp shirt with a high collar, snug waistcoat—he even had a riding crop, for crying out loud!

Sarah's pause ended in the blink of an eye. This man was obviously very deranged. Screaming wasn't likely to help, since she lived alone and her closest neighbors were quite a distance away, but it was an automatic reaction. Her lungs were full and she was ready to make as much noise as possible—maybe it would stun him into inaction or bring the dog running—but something feral was flashing through his eyes and, in a motion that seemed inhuman for its speed, he clapped a hand across her mouth before she could manage a single sound.

"Shhhh," he soothed lowly, "I mean you no harm, I swear it." She couldn't help but notice that he had a beautiful voice, the creep. It was the perfect blend of smooth vowels and a certain, inexplicable, guttural quality. Listening to that single utterance had been like being caressed by raw silk, it was sleek at first but it still had a bit of a rasp to it.

Sarah grabbed at his wrist, surprised when he allowed her to move his hand with no fight. "Get out," she said firmly. "I don't care who you are or what you're doing here, just _get out_."

He smiled strangely, a mischievous light burning in his eyes. "Your coaxing didn't work before," he said cryptically, "it won't work now."

And then, as if things hadn't been weird enough, her night got even weirder.

He turned into the dog.

Sarah had read her share of werewolf stories, seen enough of the movies to figure she had a grasp on what the genre was like. It didn't prepare her for the reality of it, didn't prepare her for the fluid, soundless transformation from man to canine. His muscles bunched, rearranging until he was the proper shape, all while silky fur overtook his body, covering him in black and a silvery white that wasn't too different from the color his hair had been. His eyes had changed shape, but remained the same arctic blue, one pupil slightly larger than the other. The riding clothes that he had been wearing simply evaporated off of him like mist, a steam that rose off his fur and disappeared into the night. The riding crop, however, remained, clenched in his mouth like a stick that had been retrieved—the solitary proof that her bizarre encounter had not been a dream.

With shaking fingers she picked up her phone, dialed as quickly as possible, and impatiently waited for a connection on the other end.

"It's three in the morning," came the groggy answer, "this had better be good."

"Meg," Sarah said, a hint of desperation in her voice, "I need you to come over. _Right now_."

"What's up," her friend was immediately alert, "did something happen?"

She shrugged even though she knew her friend couldn't see it. "I'll tell you later, just bring some of your herbs, and a leash if you have one."

"Sounds kinky, should I be worried?" Meg asked lightheartedly, but the muffled rustle of clothes betrayed her seriousness.

"Just do it, Meg," Sarah growled, then hung up the phone and turned back to her canine problem.

* * *

A/N: Okay, this one was actually pretty low on the polls, and I was thinking about taking it off altogether, when someone at The Harem (a Labyrinth/Bowie forum I am part of) posted a challenge prompt. I'm not sure why, or even how it made me think of this, but it did, so I'm ignoring the polls just this once. I promise that, after this one, I'll write the winner of the most recent polling (so be sure to vote before this story is over, if you haven't already).

This story is the first full on AU of the series, just so you know, meaning that the events of the movie never happened; that is not to say, however, that certain aspects of the movie won't play heavily into this story. Also, I've decided to break this one up into parts for easier reading, easier posting, and (hopefully) faster updates.

For those of you who have read Bodice Ripper, I'm a little sheepish to admit that Meg talks frighteningly like Liz Carver did.

I dedicate this story to my Harem sisters, both as an on-going answer to their challenge and as an apology for being gone for so long.

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Labyrinth.


	3. Never Sit On A Werewolf, part two

_**The Never Series**_

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

* * *

Never Sit On A Werewolf

Part Two.

Sarah stared at the beast; he stared back. They were locked in the juvenile contest until she blinked, at which point he began to exude an overpowering smugness. She glared; he seemed to grin. She was fighting a battle of wills against a dog, and was losing. Maybe she was personifying him, maybe he was just staring at her and she was filling in the blanks by herself because, honestly, who wouldn't be a little paranoid after seeing a man turn into an animal?

A door opened and closed downstairs, followed by quick footsteps up the stairs. The dog's ears perked, and he turned his head just in time to watch Meg hurry through the door.

Meg was a curvy redhead with more freckles than actual skin tone, and had the sweetest brown eyes Sarah had ever seen. Usually Meg dressed in vibrant colors in clothes from nearly every era but the current one. However, at the moment she was wearing sweatpants and a threadbare T-Shirt, her hair in a wild disarray as she tried not to drop the large grocery bag she was carrying.

"I came as fast as I could," she panted, "but you didn't tell me what was wrong, so I wasn't sure what herbs to bring and—_Holy shit, there's a wolf on your bed!_"

"Really?" Sarah asked, sounding calm in spite of herself. "I thought he looked more like a husky."

Meg carefully set her bag on the floor and inched closer to the bed. "I'll grant that the markings can sometimes be similar," she agreed, "and, in terms of domesticated dogs, the husky does display the most wolf-like qualities."

"But?" Sarah asked dreading the answer.

"But even your biggest husky is usually going to be shorter than your smallest wolf," she answered, still inching forward at a slow and steady rate. "Your average gray wolf can get up to three feet from paw to shoulder. It's kind of hard to tell with him laying down, but I'm guessing he'd be a likely candidate for that height."

"What else?" Sarah pressed.

Meg gave her a funny look. "What else do you need? Isn't that enough?"

The dark haired woman jerked her head in negation. "I'm clinging to the idea of him being a dog, but I'm beginning to realize that it's probably not a safe or sane idea, so I need you to prove beyond a doubt that he cannot be someone's house pet."

"Well," she shrugged, "in conjunction with the height, there's a considerable difference in weight as well. A healthy male husky is only going to weigh about sixty pounds, but a male wolf can weigh up to a hundred pounds more than that." The canine in question sat motionless, his large furry body between Sarah and her friend, intelligent blue eyes watching Meg's slow progress across the room. "Their bone structure is a little different, too. Aside from the height, a wolf is going to have a longer and bit narrower muzzle, and a broader face."

"Alright," Sarah finally relented, "so he's a wolf. But why does he have blue eyes, then?"

Meg shrugged again, "Genetic mutation, cross breeding, hereditary trait; who knows? It isn't exactly normal on a grey wolf, but it isn't unheard of either."

The wolf stood up as Meg finally drew even with the bed, circling and moving around so that she was never at his back and never directly next to Sarah. Standing at his full height on top of the bed made him a good deal taller than Meg, and it was a fact that disconcerted both women. When the redhead extended a closed fist to him for inspection he obligingly sniffed at it, even gave a quick rub of approval, but when she reached out to Sarah his ears flattened and his lips pealed back, revealing many terrifyingly sharp teeth.

Meg withdrew her hand, but didn't move. "So here's my question to you," she murmured to the still motionless Sarah. "If you thought he was just a dog, why did you call me in such a panic?"

The wolf laid back down, practically draping himself across Sarah's lap, where she did her utmost not to touch him. "I don't know how he got in this afternoon," she replied, sighing. "All the doors where shut and locked, and yet there he was, sniffing around my living room."

"That's enough to unnerve anyone, I suppose," her friend nodded.

Sarah shook her head sharply. "Oh no, that's not it," she said slowly. "The real problem is going to sound crazy. He was here when I fell asleep; the wolf, that is. But when I woke up, there was a man leaning against my footboard instead. I told him to go away, and then he _turned into the wolf_."

"Are you sure you weren't dreaming?" Meg asked quietly.

The dark haired woman frowned. "I distinctly remember waking up, and he was barely done shifting when I picked up the phone to call you."

Meg brought her hands together, nervously fiddling with her fingers. "Well, you did say you wanted a pet."

Sarah gave her an incredulous look. "Not one that could attack me in my sleep, honey, and certainly not one that was half man!"

The wolf looked up at that, ears perked forward and his tail thumped a few times against the edge of her bed. Now that the idea of him being a husky had been utterly destroy, Sarah finally realized how huge the beast was. Not only was he three feet in height, but he was probably close to six feet from the tip of his tail to his nose; he was longer than her bed was wide, which was probably why most of his tail was hanging over the edge.

"It's just…" Meg broke her out of her wolfy measurements. "It's not a full moon, and you said that he came to you in this form during the day as well. Somehow that just doesn't seem right."

"Meg, I just saw a man turn into a _wolf_, and you're going to argue semantics with me?" Sarah asked, waving her hands emphatically.

"No, but he's more like a werewolf in reverse: a wolf that can turn into a man instead of the other way around," Meg replied, trying to appease her friend. "Even accepting that werewolves exist, I've never heard of a story like this, have you?"

Sarah huffed in frustration and the wolf mimicked her noise, puffing hot air against her knees. "Nothing about this situation is normal."

The redhead shrugged uneasily, her eyes studying their canine subject. "I've just got a strange feeling that there's more at play here than we can see."

Sarah straightened at that. Meg was a practitioner of an obscure belief called Greencraft. She had once explained to Sarah that it had its roots in Old World paganism and Native American shamanism. Sarah had once asked if she fancied herself a witch. Meg had just laughed and said that she was a conduit for the powers of nature; if that meant someone wanted to call her a witch, then so be it, but she never referred to herself that way. There _were_ times when Meg whipped out her collection of pungent herbs and tried to do something or other in the odorous rings of smoke they cast, but mostly her faith manifested itself in a soul-deep reverence for nature and all things connected to it. Meg believed in communing with her ancestors, and that everything—be it rock, plant, or creature—had a spirit and, as such, some kind of omnipotent protector. She had never discussed gods, but she had talked about resonating the power within to the surrounding nature in order to achieve some outward goal.

Sarah had stopped believing in magic ages ago, but Meg's intuition was uncanny and she had gotten her impossible way on more than one occasion. If Meg felt that something strange was going on—or rather, something strang_er_ that they had yet to see—Sarah would listen. After all, this problem was beyond her scope of experience, and if Meg thought she was getting a handle on the situation then Sarah would be more than happy to leave it to her.

"So, I'm guessing burning a few bundles of sage and dragging him outside by a leash isn't going to help any, huh?" the dark haired woman finally asked, a note of sarcasm in her voice.

Meg snorted. "I suspect that we could try, but he isn't likely to do anything he doesn't want to, and at the moment it looks like he doesn't want to leave you." Her looked turn speculative. "I have a weird idea, but I'll need a few days to look into it."

Sarah's eyes rounded. "You can't mean to leave me alone with this monster!"

"It will only take a couple of days, I promise," the redhead soothed.

"Well, what am I supposed to do in the meantime?" Sarah asked, sounding increasingly lost. The wolf sat up, rubbing his head under her chin, but the gesture didn't comfort her in the least.

"Take care of him, I suppose," Meg answered. "Look," she quickly cut off her friend's objections, "if he intended to hurt you, to hunt you, he would have done it already. He's been nothing but protective and affectionate since I've been here."

"Maybe he's just savoring the thought of how tasty I'll be," Sarah suggested morbidly, to which the wolf snorted.

Meg nodded. "I agree with him: you're being ridiculous." She held up a hand before her dark haired friend could comment. "Look, contrary to popular belief, wild animals only attack for a reason." The redhead picked up her bag of supplies and began to leave; however, she stopped in the doorway and threw a, "Just don't overexcite him and you'll be fine," over her should, then was gone.

Sarah managed to wiggle out from under her furry lap-warmer, and went to the window. "I don't care what Meg thinks," she murmured, watching her friend get into a beat-up old car, "I don't trust animals, and I definitely don't trust anything that can share a man's brain."

"That's really too bad," a smooth murmur came from right behind her. "We could have so much _fun_ together."

She turned around slowly, but it didn't do her any good; she already knew that she was going to come face to face with the blond weirdo from before. And she was right; he stood just inches behind her, close enough to touch, the blue eyes of the wolf regarding her from a body that was human and male in all the essential ways, even if he was dressed like some eighteenth century fop.

"Are you going to do this a lot?" she asked snidely, trying to hold off the overwhelming reality of the situation by hiding in sarcasm. "Because I might develop a complex if you do."

"I thought your friend was quite knowledgeable," he changed to subject, "but I'm surprised at how readily she accepted the situation with no proof."

Sarah shook her head, unable to believe that she was about to have a conversation with the slice of a nightmare in front of her. "Meg has ESP; she's at one with the universe, or something like that."

"You don't believe it?" he asked, lips quirking into a playful smile that made her heart beat a little faster.

"Her I believe, because she's been right about too many things in the past for me to dismiss, but if anyone else tried to tell me that, I would probably think they're a lunatic," she replied. "Speaking of which, who are you?"

His smile deepened, revealing that even in his human form his teeth still retained their canine sharpness. "Jareth," he answered, bringing a hand up to trace the line of her jaw.

Sarah jerked back a step, but quickly found herself pressed against the window frame. "Let me rephrase that: _what_ are you?" she asked, crossing her arms defensively.

He almost looked apologetic as he brought his hands up to either side of her head, effectively trapping her between him and the wall. "I'm sorry, I can't tell you, which is unfortunate because it does tend to impress," Jareth replied with an easy grin. "You have to figure it out on your own, then I can tell you."

"What's the point in that?" her brow furrowed. "By then I'll already know!"

He laughed, a deep sound that sent chills up her spine. "I don't make the rules, Sarah; I'm just bound by them."

His voice did wicked things to her name, things that made her glad she was divorced. "So, I'm guessing you're not a werewolf then," she stated, increasingly nervous with his close proximity.

He shook his head, causing a swath of blond hair to shade his eyes, lending them a further air of mystery. "I wasn't born this way or bitten by some poor villager who was frothing at the mouth, if that's what you were wondering," Jareth replied, moving one hand to fiddle absently with one of her earrings, "and the lunar _phases_ have nothing to do with it."

Sarah shivered at his touch, grabbing him at the wrist to pull him away. He stopped but didn't move, his fingers frozen in a caress. "What do you mean?" she finally asked.

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. "You know that movie Disney that came out with not long ago, the one with the pirates? I'm like that."

"You're a pirate-zombie?" she asked sarcastically, trying to ignore his touch.

His perpetual grin turned wicked. "The moonlight shows me for what I really am," he answered just as the first rays of the morning sun peaked above the horizon.

* * *

"He said his name was Jareth," Sarah murmured into the phone, gazing sightlessly into the empty fireplace as she ignored the giant wolf head in her lap.

"Jareth?" Meg repeated. "That's sound familiar for some reason; I'll ask my Uncle Dillsby."

The wolf in question was making sad eyes at her and every once in a while he would rub his cheek against her legs, trying desperately to beg a pet out of her. "I thought your Uncle Dillsby was dead," she replied, ignoring the wolf.

Meg's snort was clearly audible from the other end. "That's never stopped me before. Besides, this is the sort of thing that Uncle lives for, or rather… unlives for."

"I'm not even going to try to understand that statement," the dark haired woman grumbled. "I just hope that you find something out," she said before hanging up.

Sarah had been on the verge of screaming ever since that morning. Watching a strange man turn into a wolf the moment he was touched by the sun was enough to put any woman out of sorts. And if that hadn't been enough, the damn wolf had never left her side; as a matter of fact he had been acting downright needy. Jareth had been taking any excuse to brush up against her, to lay his head in her lap, to press himself against her knees, or to lick her hand, and it was beginning to get on her nerves. If he had been a normal dog she wouldn't have felt so hostile; she probably would have started petting him ages ago. But he was neither normal nor a dog; every time she thought about simply giving in and running her hands over his thick coat she remembered that this was a wild animal, not a pet, and lurking somewhere in that wolfish body was the heart and mind of a man, and an annoying one at that if last night had been any indication. The itch to touch him always died a swift death when she thought that it wasn't really an animal she would be touching, but a man, and that made any caress strangely intimate, not to mention that she had sworn off men for the time being.

Jareth suddenly rose from the couch, padding his way across the room and down the hall before he sat by her front door.

Sarah followed him. "Halleluiah," she said quietly. "Does this mean you're ready to leave?"

His ears pressed back and the look he shot her was almost chiding, if a wolf could in fact give such a look.

"All right," she sighed in exasperation, "search me if I know what the hell you're thinking." she jumped when someone knocked on the door. "Well, that was creepy," she murmured to herself, regarding the wolf with narrowed eyes. Had he sensed the other's presence so greatly in advanced?

Sarah opened the door to a face that she had been hoping not to see for the rest of her life, if possible. He was a handsome man with dark hair and a perfect tan. He was also her scum-sucking ex-husband, Isaac, and she was no more thrilled to see him than if she had opened the door to find a dead horse on her porch. It was at times like these that she was glad she had opted for the screened door; at least it kept a barrier between them.

"Hey, babe," Isaac smiled, the smarmy charm rolling off him in waves. Luckily, she had grown immune to his over the top antics quite some time ago.

"I'm not your babe," she replied dispassionately, "I'm not your anything. We're divorced Isaac; don't make me file a restraining order on top of that."

"Is talking to me really so bad?" he asked, trying to make puppy eyes at her, but Jareth definitely had him beat at that.

"I would rather shoot myself in the foot with a nail gun than talk to you," she sighed angrily, "but seeing as I don't have one, I suppose I'll have to endure this torture. What do you want?"

Isaac made a thoughtful face. "I thought we were such a good couple, baby doll; I'm just trying to figure out when things went wrong."

She stared at him in incredulity. "Probably about the time that I realized you wanted a free ride more than you wanted a wife," she growled. "You know, for the longest time I couldn't figure out what had attracted you to me, my looks or my personality? But it wasn't either of those things; it was my healthy bank statement, wasn't it?"

Isaac reached for the screened door latch. "Let's just talk this over."

Jareth jumped up a moment before Isaac could open the door, laying his massive paws against the frame; he was nearly eye-level with her ex. His lips were pulled back and he was letting out a low, menacing growl. This wasn't at all like when Meg had tried to touch her; he hadn't really seemed offended then, and he had simply bared his teeth a little in warning. This, however, was full on guarding behavior born of anger.

Isaac quickly backed up a few steps. "Does he bite?" he asked worriedly.

Sarah smiled for the first time in what felt like days. "I don't know," she said flippantly, reaching for the door handle. "Want to find out?"

Isaac was off her porch and ducking into his car in the blink of an eye, a hurried, "We'll talk later," thrown over his shoulder before he was gone.

"Well," Sarah said, lifting a hand to rub the wolf between his ears, "that's certainly the most fun I've had since the divorce settlement."

Jareth seemed to freeze for a moment, paws still pressed the screened door frame, before he tilted his head back a bit, further into her caress.

Much too late, Sarah realized the mistake she had made.

* * *

A/N: Next week is going to be a bit crazy for me, so please keep that in mind if my next update (which will probably be for LFT) comes out a little late.

To those of you who are about to send reviews to me that I made a continuity error by talking about Pirates of the Caribbean, relax. This is an AU, which means that I'm taking the liberty of setting it in the present day, give or take a few years.

This story has required a bit of research on things that aren't easy to find (except for the wolf and husky information; that was all easy to look for). On the score of Greencraft, I apologize deeply because there were too many types of it for me to get a solid answer, which means I made up pretty much everything you see here. There's a third thing as well, but that won't come in until the next part, so hopefully I'll be able to find something on that by then.

I dedicate this part to BlueArcticWolf and Shadow-D'hampyr; it's thanks to these two wonderful reviewers that this part came so quickly, instead of weeks or months from now.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Jareth or Sarah. Disney owns itself and Pirates of the Caribbean.


	4. Never Sit On A Werewolf, part three

_**The Never Series**_

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

* * *

Never Sit On A Werewolf

Part Three.

When it came to ignoring things, Sarah figured that she should hold the world title. She had been able to ignore for a while that her husband had not loved her, she successfully ignored that her house was a hodgepodge of poorly done repair jobs and still needed a lot of work before it could be considered wholly comfortable, she had ignored that her best friend had some sort of talent or power that didn't fit in with her idea of how the world worked, but she could not ignore _this_. Oh sure, it had been easy to ignore the attention-seeking wolf at first, but that had been before she had pet him. Now he was…

Loveable.

And it was kind of disturbing. Jareth's fur had felt like silk under her fingertips, cool and exquisitely soft. Sarah really hadn't registered at first what she had been doing, but the moment she realized she was rubbing the wolf behind his ears, a warmth had skittered up through her fingers, traveling lazily along her arm until it had infused her entire body. It had been like being wrapped in warm towels after a long day out in the cold. It was comforting, and she was a woman starved for comfort. One touch turned into two, two into three, and so on until she had no idea how many times she had patted his muzzle or stroked his back. Any moment she was not touching him was suddenly a moment of pure torture. It was unnatural but, at the same time, he filled her with a sense of peace. Was that so wrong?

And the sad answer was that, yes, it was a bit wrong. Sure, his companionship was admirable, but touching him did something strange to her; it was enchanting, and yet at the same time it made her skin feel too tight. So while Jareth drooled himself into a shut-eyed stupor of pure bliss, Sarah couldn't help but worry even as she wove her fingers through his soft fur. In the end, she chose to not to ignore it, but to simple accept this new dimension to their relationship until she could find a way to get rid of him entirely.

There was absolutely no warning about it, although in retrospect it probably wouldn't have helped her much if there had been. One moment she had been lost in a book and cuddling up to her wolfy houseguest, and the next moment she had been deliberately hiding behind her book because she was now cuddled against a man.

"Sun's set then, has it?" Sarah asked from behind her book, trying to sound nonchalant and failing miserably.

She felt him shake his head from somewhere behind her shoulder. "No, but the moon has already risen."

"But that's cheating," she frowned. "You changed back into a wolf this morning when the sun came up!"

His arms curled around her waist as he rested his chin against her shoulder. "Yes, but it wouldn't have been _nearly_ as dramatic if I had waited for the moon to set."

"Do you mean to tell me," she hissed, barely managing to refrain from elbowing him, "that there could be some time in the future where I'll have to put up with you for most of the day, all because the moon is out even when it isn't night?"

"More or less," Jareth responded happily, nuzzling her ear.

Sarah froze, trying to ignore his touch but, much like with his wolf form, the more she felt him, the more she _wanted_ to feel him.

A shiver worked its way up her spine when he suddenly nipped at her shoulder. "Like that, do you?" he whispered against the skin of her neck, sounding smug.

And suddenly Sarah's mind flew back to Isaac. How many times had he asked her the same question in that same insufferable tone? And the whole time he had only done it because she had had something he'd wanted. She'd been nothing more than a whore with benefits to that man. Her heart stuttered a bit at that thought. She had wasted precious years of her life on a man who hadn't loved her. Wasn't she doing the same thing here? But, then again, she wasn't necessarily looking for love, maybe just a little companionship.

Sarah quickly shook the thought from her head. That was a dangerous idea she did not want to entertain; she refused to be a man's fool again. Quickly, she hit Jareth over the head with her book, scrambling away when he loosened his hold on her waist.

He looked back at her, frowning, confusion in his eyes. After a moment, he brought a hand up to rub his head. "What was that-"

"I need to call Meg," Sarah blurted in a hurry, on the verge of panic. She practically ran to the phone when his frown deepened.

"Good timing, Sarah," Meg called from the other line.

The dark haired woman frowned. "How did you know it was me?" she asked, trying to ignore the fact that she could _feel_ Jareth drawing closer to her. "You don't have caller ID."

"Lucky guess," her friend chirped happily, "but as long as I'm right, what does it matter? Anyway," her voice grew somber, "I think you and your werewolf need to come over; I might have found something."

"That was quick," Sarah replied in surprise. "Thank goodness."

"Don't count your blessings yet," Meg warned. "I have a bad feeling about this."

* * *

Driving with Jareth had been an exercise in patience. The weak afternoon sun had still made his hair look like spun gold, still made his eyes shine with an unearthly blue fire, still made him look like a living work of art created by a master whose grip on reality had slipped just a little bit. In short, it had been hell. She had tried desperately to ignore him, and for a while she had succeeded. Then she'd noticed that he'd been wearing dark jeans and a black t-shirt, and it shouldn't have looked good on the fop, but it did. He wasn't built like a muscle man, but the shirt was pulled tight enough to reveal his lean and powerful form, and his lithe muscles appealed to her more than anything else could have. So it was with great difficultly that she fought the urge to fidget when she found herself sitting next to him, fifteen minutes later, in Meg's living room.

"So, what have you found out about the Big Bad Wolf, Little Red?" Jareth asked.

Meg ignored him, turning her attention to Sarah, who was trying very hard not to show how uncomfortable she was sitting so close to Jareth. "He's an obscure fertility god," she finally said, eyeing her friend strangely.

Sarah felt the ground drop away from under her. "Like Greencraft-obscure?" she asked, wishing for some sort of touchstone in this crazy landscape they were suddenly traversing.

"No," Meg shook her head, "not one of mine, but a god all the same."

Jareth chuckled then, and Sarah would have called it triumphant if his eyes hadn't been narrowed so calculatingly. "And you found this out on your own, did you?" he asked quietly. "Not that it matters, either way," he added as an afterthought. "Now that you both know, I can talk about myself without reservation."

Meg sighed, interrupting Sarah when she began to make a comment about how self-centered that sounded. "I think you two need to meet my Uncle Dillsby. He's waiting in the other room," she gestured to a dimly lit doorway that was mostly obscured by a hanging curtain.

Walking over the threshold felt strange to Sarah, as though the curtain clung to her, slowly drawing out a small part of her soul; it left her empty and shaken and more than a little dizzy. The room was dark and quiet however, and she was able to recollect herself quickly. The emptiness lingered though.

"I'd like to present both of you to my Uncle Dillsby," Meg stated grandly as she entered through the curtain.

It was then that Sarah realized the room wasn't lit by candles in colored glasses, like she had though. Instead, an aqua light poured from a man that hovered in the center of the room. He was tall, and muscled more overtly than Jareth. His tan skin had a strange caress of blueish-green to it, matching the Grecian chiton he was wearing, while his midnight colored hair floated around him serenely, making it look for all the world as though he were under water. Aside from the fact that he was floating on air and glowing, the man would have looked perfectly normal… well, except for the long slash across his chest that had dyed the front of his tunic and ugly red. "I had a feeling it was you, my old friend," he spoke to Jareth, his voice oddly echoed, but powerful in its own right.

The blond laughed humorlessly. "Friend is a strange way of putting it, Caerlik; protégé, rival, tormentor, and murderer, certainly, but never friend."

"You wound me, Jareth," Uncle Dillsby—Caerlik?—replied, a bored look on his handsome face.

"Yes, I did," he answered succinctly, openly staring at the bloody rip across the other man's chest.

Dillsby's face twisted angrily. "I meant emotionally, you twit."

"I know," Jareth answered with a wicked grin, "but I do so enjoy yanking your chain."

"I should have been more firm with you," Dillsby reflected to himself, shaking his head, "taught you proper respect and punished you a bit more."

"You did punish me," Jareth said, a chillingly blank look on his face. "I am only a man by the grace of the moon so, by my own magic, I am a man at a time when female passion is at its highest. It didn't bother me at first, you knew it wouldn't, but a lover in the dark _stays_ in the dark; you knew I could be nothing more than a fleeting dream to those women, a dirty little affair that was savored but soon forgotten. You knew I wouldn't be able to possess them, not like I used to. I _need_ that connection, Caerlik, otherwise I'm nothing to them; I can revel in the anonymity of my craft, but only if I know that I'll always mean something more than their other lovers. I have been punished greatly."

Dillsby rolled his eyes. "Yes, and then you killed me, so I'm thinking it wasn't exactly the most _effective_ punishment."

"Am I the only one who's completely lost here?" Sarah asked suddenly, feeling like she was in high school calculus all over again: she was staring at _something_ and she had absolutely no idea if it was the problem or the solution.

"Don't concern yourself with him, Sarah," Jareth replied, the dark look in his eyes softening a bit when he turned to her. "He's just a bitter old fool."

"Better than a _murdering_ old fool," Dillsby shot back, his hair billowing around him as though he were momentarily trapped in a strong current.

"A mere technicality, I'm sure," Jareth sneered, his blue-flame eyes lit with a rage that bordered on inhuman. His sharp gaze swept over to Meg who, despite her silence, looked just as confused as Sarah felt. "I appreciate your attempted help, but now I'm asking you to stay out of the matter. There is no room for you in this. Sarah," he turned back to the dark haired woman and held out his hand imperiously, "we're going home."

She stared at his hand, dread sweeping through her. Why did it suddenly feel as though Jareth was making her choose sides, like he was asking for something from her, some sort of… submission? "What's going on?" she persisted, too worried that taking his hand would be some sort of signal that she valued him over anything else.

"I will explain everything," he soothed hypnotically, "once we get home."

Sarah darted a look to Meg, who appeared to be engrossed in studying the floor. The raven-haired woman sighed when she thought of the choice she was being asked to make. The red head was her best friend, but Sarah was already too deep into this mess to pull herself out, which meant she needed information. It looked like the only way to get that information was to accept whatever Jareth was offering. With a damning sigh, she cast her fate, laying her own hand within Jareth's.

Dillsby scoffed loudly. "He will fuck you and then destroy you, woman. You are a fool."

She already knew that.

* * *

Sarah slammed the door behind her, wishing that the act could somehow bring her even the smallest sliver of relief, but it didn't. The loud slam echoed in her empty house, like the tolling of a bell, but whether that tolling was for her or the man standing quietly before her she had yet to figure out.

"Would you like something to drink?" Jareth asked quietly.

"Would I like something to drink?" Sarah repeated, a twinge of hysteria coloring her voice. "In twenty-four hours I have been forced to suffer the invasion of a werewolf into my home, been visited by my ex-husband, belittled by a dead man, and found out that my uninvited houseguest is really some sort of cursed god! And you want to know if I would care for a _drink_? I would care for some _answers_!" Her voice had steadily risen over the course of her outbreak, to the point where she was practically screaming by the end of it.

"It's not a particularly long story," Jareth shrugged, looking annoyingly elegant in his t-shirt and jeans, "but I thought that perhaps you would like a little liquid fortification before we begin."

Sarah deflated, overwhelmed and still feeling oddly empty. "Sure," she said gloomily, "why not?"

He made a complicated gesture, his golden hair caught in an errant wind, then pulled a delicate looking glass from thin air.

"How did you do that?" she asked, momentarily mystified.

He handed her the glass, a sad smile playing about his lips. "This? It's just a parlour trick." Jareth ran a hand through his hair, his frustrated look at odds with the playfulness he had exhibited the night before. "I could have the heavens rain down chocolate, if it would make you happy."

Sarah snorted. "Why?"

"I like making women happy," Jareth answered confusedly.

"No," she shook her head. "I meant: why chocolate? If it came down in blocks it would probably hurt, not to mention do a lot of damage, and if it came down in syrup it would just be a sticky mess." She frowned in disgust, "Could you imagine trying to wash that crap out of your hair?"

He smiled bemusedly. "You're not very romantic, are you?"

She rubbed at her arm with her free hand, feeling suddenly chilled as she thought of Isaac once more. "In my experience, there's no such thing as romance. It's just an illusion that men create to trap lonely women." She jumped when Jareth's arms curled around her, pressing her head to his chest. It was cozy in a strange way, although somewhat awkward thanks to the glass in her hand.

"It was that fool at the door, wasn't it?" he whispered into her ear.

Sarah shuddered. "Isaac? What about him?"

"He hurt you," Jareth growled lowly, "abused and bewildered you until you finally cut him out of your life." A finger pressed gently under her chin until she was forced to meet his blue gaze. "But it was too late because the damage was already done, wasn't it? You have too many scars on your heart, and you're too scared to open yourself back up for fear of getting more."

She shifted restlessly in his grasp, his thoughts much too close to the truth for her comfort. "What," she snapped, getting defensive, "you're the God of Love now?"

His arms tensed around her, but he didn't pull away. If anything, Jareth only cuddled her closer. "No," he finally answered, a strange note rolling through his accented voice, "and perhaps _that_ was my failing."

Sarah felt instantly guilty for lashing out at him. She wasn't entirely sure what to think about Jareth—the way he had entered her life, and the things she was learning about him were pushing her to her limits—but he had been nothing, if not companionable and kind. So what if he was insightful when it came to women, and was much too blunt about emotional wounds that she wanted to keep in the dark? True, it hurt to think about her failed marriage and the ways that it had jaded her, but he obviously had his own pains to nurse and it would be petty of her to point those out. She would not let immaturity and long-ago broken hearts push away the only man who had been kind to her in longer than she cared to remember. All the same, though, he had promised her information, and it was knowledge that she had a terrible feeling she would need in the coming days.

"What happened?" she asked softly, laying her head against his chest again. She had forgotten how nice it was to simply touch and be touched.

"The same thing that always happens," he replied, a hint of resignation in his voice, "pride made me do something stupid." He paused for a moment, then added, "This is the part where you might want to start drinking. It's not a pleasant story."

* * *

A/N: That was shorter than expected, sorry, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

My absence has been protracted and unexplained, and for that I'm sorry, but after a crazy semester (only two weeks left!) and an unexpected death in the family, I didn't much feel like writing, nor did I have the time. But now I'm back, and ready to start weaving stories again. There are still a lot of stressful things going on right now, but hopefully they'll help me more than they'll hinder me.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Jareth or Sarah, everything else is mine.


	5. Never Sit On A Werewolf, part four

**The Never Series**

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

* * *

Never Sit On A Werewolf

Part Four

"How bad could it be?" Sarah asked quietly, her head still resting against his chest. Perhaps it was cowardice that made her avoid his eyes in that moment, but she suspected it was the fact that she could tell Jareth was ashamed of whatever story he was about to tell that kept her from confronting him face to face.

"Bad," he answered on a heavy sigh, moving one arm so that he could delve his fingers into the hair at the back of her neck. "Most fertility gods are women," he finally began, his fingers now massaging her scalp, "which makes a great deal of sense. Who better to pray to for a child than someone who is a mother herself? For eons, all that is fertile about this world—birthing, harvesting, the very act of creation, itself—was tied to a certain sense of femininity."

"Are you about to tell me that you're really a woman?" Sarah snorted disbelievingly. Setting down her glass on a nearby table, she hooked her fingers into the fabric of his shirt; the muscles that rippled underneath were undeniably male.

"No," he replied, a smile in his voice before he sobered. "I'm saying it might have been better if it had stayed that way. A woman's world should have been left to women but, inevitably, men found a way to superimpose their own desires upon the natural order of things. Ideas of virility began to creep into the religion." Jareth shrugged, his hand running through her hair again. "It wasn't entirely unfounded. There was a certain yin and yang about it: the fertile meeting the virile. After all, it wasn't enough to simply have rich soil, you had to have healthy seeds too, if you wanted anything to grow."

"So the field opened up to men," she supplied, thinking how odd it was to be talking about godhood like it was a job market.

He nodded. "In essence, though there were never as many male fertility gods as the female ones. You see, male fertility gods had one outstanding drawback."

Sarah's fingers began to trace little patterns into his shirt. "They thought with the lesser of their two heads?" she guessed, thinking how true it was of mortal men, anyway.

Jareth laughed, a deep and surprised sound that shook Sarah to her toes. "Crude," he chuckled, "but true. The problem with virility is that it's really an entity unto itself, with very little having to do with procreation at all. After a while, what men were praying for wasn't so much being able to create healthy babies as being strong, outstanding from other men, and impressive between the sheets."

"I'm guessing these desires were mirrored badly in their gods," she murmured, lifting her head.

"And so our story starts," he replied, cuddling her closer, if that were possible, and effectively stopping her from meeting his eyes.

Sarah stared at his throat, at the strong muscles that ran from his shoulders and chest up to his neck, and silently waited for him to begin. She didn't have to wait long.

"I was full of myself, if you hadn't already guessed," his arm around her waist tightened as he pulled both of them to the sofa. In a quick move he had arranged himself so that he was lying across all three cushions, Sarah draped atop him like a cat, her head nestled under his chin so that she still couldn't look him in the face. "I matched ever Don Juan, every Lothario on this planet, and left their women wanting _more_."

"You stole their conquests?" she asked hesitantly.

"It was a _thrill_," Jareth replied, a note of self-disgust in his voice, "to know that I could provide those women with something that no one else could ever give them, that I would always be the _best_." He began running his hands up and down her back, as though the motion was more soothing to him than it was to her. "Caerlik warned me not to meddle in affairs of the heart, and I told him that the heart was the farthest thing from my concern; I was only meddling in affairs, period. I couldn't see, then, that not only were my actions self-destructive to the point of stupidity, but they were also harming the very people I had been sworn to watch over."

Sarah reached up and buried her hands in his hair, twining the silky strands in her fingers. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a woman then came along and you fell in love with her."

"Yes," he murmured, his hands moving lower, dangerously close to her rear end, "but it wasn't me who loved her, it was Caerlik." His fingers started to trace the waistband of her pants. "I always thought love was just something the gods created in order to trick humans into staying with each other long enough to have children."

"If you _dare_ cop a feel while in the middle of telling me how copping feels got you into so much trouble in the first place, I'm going to have to hit you," she warned him, but didn't move her hands from his hair to stop his curious fingers. "So?" she encouraged after a moment. "What happened with this woman?"

"Caerlik was my mentor, not really a friend—I don't think I ever really had any of those—we were more competitors than anything else. He would show me a skill, and I would endeavor to do it better than him." He shrugged, one arm finally settling across her waist.

"I don't like where this is headed," Sarah murmured into his chest.

Jareth gave a dry, humorless laugh, "Very few would. Love was beyond my experience, beyond my understanding, because I didn't believe it truly existed. All I saw was a pretty woman on Caerlik's arm, and I wanted _nothing_ _more_ than to take her away from him."

Sarah shuddered. "What was she like?" she asked, wondering was sort of jewel that woman must have been to turn the head of not one god, but two.

"I don't even remember her name, Sarah," he replied sadly. "She meant so very little at the time. Just another game to play against Caerlik."

She shuddered again, only drawing mild comfort from his soothing motions.

"I seduced her, used all my powers and every trick I knew to get her away from Caerlik's side." Jareth laughed his hollow laugh once more. "He caught us together and said if I was going to rut like an animal, I might as well _be_ an animal."

She didn't want to say anything that would hurt him, but having been on the receiving end of a man's lust without any benefit of his love, she knew she wouldn't be able to completely temper her response. "Yeah well, maybe you should have kept your pants on."

"I'm a fertility god," he almost sounded indignant, but his voice was still tinged with that empty sadness.

She snorted, trying to lighten the heavy mood, "That doesn't mean you have to _personally_ ensure every woman's pregnancy."

"Funny, Caerlik said the same thing," the smile in his tone was plain, as though he sensed her need to step back from the situation for just a moment.

"Are you starting to notice a pattern yet?" she joked, then squealed when he turned slightly, so that she was pressed between him and the back of the sofa. Molded to him from thigh to chest, she finally looked into his eyes. His blue depths were quiet, but not still; there was pain there, an acknowledgement of his mistakes and a soul deep resignation at not being able to change them.

"He loved her," Jareth murmured after a moment, "really, truly _loved_ her. But she never loved him again; she couldn't, she was simply incapable of it. She died a bitter old woman. And she wasn't the only one; there were dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of women who never loved again, whose daughters were born incapable of finding love, until there was this vast clan of women who I had literally and figuratively screwed over."

"I don't understand," Sarah shook her head, "I mean, Caerlik's woman I get, but the other women and their daughters… why couldn't they love?"

"There's something about the affections of a god that imprints itself into the receiver, until it becomes so much a part of them that they are able to pass it on to their children." His hand stroked over her cheek. "If I had gone to those women out of love, or any sort of caring at all beyond the interest of conquest, they would have led blest lives. But I graced their beds out of greed, I took from their bodies until there was nothing left to give."

Her fingers went back to clutching at his shirt. "You cursed them with your indifference?"

His hand flitted down her neck. "Yes," he whispered.

Sarah shivered at his touch, reveling in the simple sensation of being held so gently, being touched so reverently. If this was how he had treated all those other women, then she certainly couldn't blame them for having fallen prey to him. It was an unintentionally sobering thought—was she falling too? Would he take her and then cast her aside, as he had so many others, to live out the remainder of her life in a barren, loveless haze?

But wasn't she already? Hadn't Isaac done to her what Jareth had effectively done to all his conquests? Sure, his story had a supernatural tilt to it, whereas Isaac had merely played with her emotions, but the end result was still the same. If she was doomed to live without love forever, would it be so wrong to partake in the comfort that came from Jareth's embrace?

"What happened between you and Caerlik?" she said suddenly, trying to steer her thoughts away from the dangerous territory it had taken a trek into.

His eyes darkened from the color of the sea to a midnight abyss at the mention of the other god—or, at least, she assumed he was a god, Jareth hadn't really said either way. "True to form," he growled lowly, a sound that rumbled through both their chests, "Caerlik turned me into an animal, doomed to live in fur until the moon rises. You see, the moon doesn't just influence the tides, it influences a woman's passion as well; the problem is that the higher the moon gets, the more surreal the encounter becomes. I could still be with women, once I had taken on my proper form, but they would never remember me, never respond in quite the same way as if they knew they weren't dreaming."

"It bothered you?" she questioned, trying to ignore the way his solid thigh pressed between her own.

"It was just a blow to my ego at first, nothing more. But Caerlik knew me better than I knew myself," he leaned down, resting his forehead against hers so that they were facing each other without really having to _see_ one another. "It drove me insane, after a while. The sex was fulfilling on a physical level, but I needed that emotional connectedness, no matter how temporary, to ground myself. A dream might pleasure you beyond imagination, but you'll feel no need to hold on to it because it is, after all, just a dream. Caerlik robbed me of something I needed, and without it I simply drifted."

"So you killed him?" Sarah asked, remembering the bloody rip across the other man's chest.

"Wouldn't you have?" Jareth countered.

She shook her head, which turned into a nuzzling motion since their foreheads were pressed together. "No, but I'm not an angry god, so it's probably not a fair judgment."

* * *

"So what did you do with your life after your… falling out with Caerlik?" Sarah asked, several hours later as she laid in bed, a book forgotten at her side. The night had passed by in a blur, most of it spent cuddled into her houseguest as they both simply rested on the couch. A large part of her had thrilled at the contact, at the basic, instinctual kinship that had sparked from the gentle touches, despite the serious and sobering nature of the story he had told her.

Jareth—who had, oddly, been giving her a little bit of privacy—came in from the other room where he had been doing who-knows-what. "I continued on as I had, for a while," he replied, looking thoughtful, "drifting from place to place, woman to woman."

"Old habits die hard, I guess," she murmured cynically, fingertips playing with the edges of her book.

He hummed noncommittally. "I wasn't thinking about all the years ahead of me, or how much worse the bed-hopping was going to begin grating on my nerves. Soon, something that had once been a joy and a way of life was all but intolerable."

"So what did you do?" she repeated, watching him settle at the foot of her bed and cross his ankles, looking just the way he had when she's first laid eyes on him.

He shrugged elegantly, a self-depreciating smile tugging at the corner of his lips, "I was torn. I couldn't use any of my powers unless I was in human form and, after making a career out of whoring, I wasn't really sure what to do anymore when the sex lost its appeal. My life as a god had, essentially, dead-ended. The only natural conclusion seemed to be that I had to find a way to undo whatever curse Caerlik had placed on me."

Sarah sat up a little from her slouch against the pillows. "I sense a 'but' coming on."

"But," Jareth crooned, truly smiling now, "there was a part of me that didn't so much mind having to spend half my time as a wolf." He leaned further back into the footboard, stretching his legs out. "There was a simple beauty to being an animal. No one was going to take care of me, to make sure I was being looked after, so I had to provide for myself. Eat, sleep, protect, defend: being a wolf was about nothing more than survival. Sometimes that was easy, sometimes it was hard, but my life _finally_ had a purpose."

"But?" she prompted when he paused overlong.

He shrugged. "No matter how much time I spend as a wolf, I don't forget who I am, what I've done, or where I've been. When I change into an animal, the instinct takes over but what makes me who I am—the thoughts and feelings—never goes away."

She wondered what it would be like to struggle between two worlds, one fire and the other ice, to find comfort but not be able to fully let go of a previous passion. What was it like to find a simple and rewarding life to live, but to still lust after the life that had come with so many complications and disasters? She could only imagine what actions he regretted, what horrors he hadn't told her about, and yet he still chased after that decadent godhood. In her opinion, though she hadn't known him long, she thought that the wolf side balanced him out—after all, continued survival came with a certain amount of forced responsibility that he'd never had to bear before—and without it he would simply be doomed to make the same mistakes all over again.

"I became obsessed with finding a away to unravel the curse," Jareth interrupted her thoughts.

Sarah frowned. "Why couldn't you just undo it yourself when you weren't the wolf?"

He shook his head. "I never knew what Caerlik did in the first place so I couldn't do it myself, and since he was dead it wasn't as though I could simply ask him."

"But you can talk to him now," she said slowly. "It's unconventional but, dead or not, we both know you can talk to him."

He shut his eyes for a moment and ran a hand through his hair. "Do you really think he's going to tell the man who murdered him and stole his love how to do _anything_?"

"Well, no," she replied, thinking practically, "but it never hurts to try, does it? Besides, if that doesn't work, we can always ask Meg if there's anything she might be able to do."

"You have a remarkable talent for ignoring the fact that I killed one and insulted the other," he said, giving her a funny look.

"I know," she murmured glumly. "I'm great at being oblivious."

In one swift move, Jareth had uncrossed his ankles and sprung forward so that he was resting expertly on his toes, body crouched like a hunting animal, mere inches from her. "What happened?" he whispered, a strange light in his blue eyes.

Sarah backed up reflexively, but found that she was already pressed against the head of the bed. "Nothing," she denied.

"Oh, no," he chastised. "I shared my story, and now I'm sick unto death of talking about myself. I want to hear about you."

"There's nothing to tell," she persisted, flinching when one of his hands reached out to cup her cheek. She didn't like talking about herself, about the stupid mistakes that she had made and how they were still affecting her life. A small voice in her said she was being unfair, that he had bared himself to her scrutiny, so it was only right that she did the same, but logic didn't heal a wounded heart.

"You just sprang into existence?" he teased, fingers smoothing over her cheek. "What makes you tick, Sarah Williams? I want to know." His fingers trailed lower, until they were cupping her jaw. "I'll take whatever you give but, above all, I'm curious about the fool who was at your door earlier today, and how you came to live in this place."

"Don't make fun of my home," she snapped. So her old Victorian was a little… odd, but it was still home and she loved it, quirks and all.

"I'm not," he crooned soothingly, his fingers drifting toward her chin.

Sarah closed her eyes for a few minutes, gathering what strength she could. She could feel Jareth waiting, could feel his penetrating gaze focused on her. The mark of the deadliest hunter, she thought idly, was his unwavering patience; he knew that his prey would come to him, that he could outwait anything until his opponent was reckless enough to throw their lot in with the wolves.

She shivered, opening her eyes. "Growing up, my family life was nothing to speak of. Not bad or good, just average. I got decent grades in school, I did fairly well in college; I just plodded along like a content little lamb until I met Isaac. Everything changed with him." She shivered again, although she wasn't quite sure if it was out of revulsion from Isaac, or from Jareth's fingers stroking over her throat. "Average little Sarah got to feel like someone special for once," she snorted in self-disgust. "All my life I was just the girl next door, a great friend but not particularly interesting enough to go out with. I thought that maybe Isaac saw something that no one else had, that he saw something worthwhile in me."

Jareth's hand moved to the back of her neck, where he began playing with her hair. "What happened?" he urged quietly, a somber look on his face.

"God, I feel like such a fool," she moaned. "He swept me up in whirlwind: dinner at nice restaurants, dancing on the beach at night, quiet little picnics out in the woods. I fell hard and fast. He treated me like no one else ever had, like I was precious to him, worth loving above all other women on earth. But it all started to fall apart after we got married."

A strange light had entered Jareth's eyes, intense and… angry?

Sarah looked away, breaking eye contact, feeling overwhelmed by her old shame. "He started to become indifferent," she whispered, "he didn't seem to care what I did with my time or if we even saw each other over the course of a day; sometimes he wouldn't even sleep in the same bed with me." Her heart felt sick at the words, but there was something cathartic about being able to share her pain with someone else. "Then he started disappearing for days at a time, gone for all those long hours with absolutely no consideration to me other than a brief call on the phone to let me know he was alive, but never telling me where he was or who he was with."

"You tolerated it?" Jareth asked in a neutral tone.

"I didn't know what else to do." She shrugged, "You remember the romance long after it's gone. I thought, in the classic fashion of foolish women everywhere, that maybe I was doing something wrong, that it was my fault he was being driven away. But you can only be oblivious for so long before you have to wake up and face reality." She paused, unconsciously leaning back into the hand behind her neck. Jareth's presence was solid and comforting, something to hold onto, to draw her away from the past. "Isaac's behavior had changed right after the wedding. Whatever he was after, he obviously thought he'd gotten it then and didn't have to keep pretending to be in love with me for it."

"What did he want?" he asked quietly, still carefully neutral.

"Money," she whispered, focusing on Jareth's throat. "He didn't want to have to work his way through life like everybody else. A good interior designer makes a decent living, and he knew my business was starting to get successful." She sighed heavily. "It wasn't hard to put two and two together, but he was the first man to really show me the kind of attention I had always wanted; it was hard not to cling to the fantasy, even after it had died." Her eyes felt suddenly tight, tears just waiting to fall. "You know what the really stupid thing is? I still—"

Jareth's lips crashed against her own, cutting her weepy declaration off. The hand at the back of her neck cupped the base of her skull, tilting her head slightly to the side and making sure that she wouldn't pull out of the kiss too soon. Not that she wanted to. They had been flirting the line between companionable and intimate all day, talking to each other like friends but touching each other like shy lovers. There was something more to the kiss though, something more than the simple culmination of too much teasing: there was a passion she couldn't explain. Nothing about the situation seemed completely sane; she had learned that he was a murderer with the morals of an alley cat, and she had just poured out the sordid tale of her ex-husband and yet, somehow, she was still lip-locked with this man that she barely knew. And it felt _right_.

Fire lanced through Sarah's blood, and she keened softly in the back of her throat. Jareth made a sound of pure male satisfaction in response, his tongue sweeping through her mouth, staking claim. Seconds passed into minutes, one kiss blurred into two and then three, until their mouths were making love in a way that no other act could match. When they finally broke apart, it was only far enough to breath, their lips still faintly touching.

"You don't still love him," Jareth snarled, the sound rolling through her from the way his lips continued to brush against her own. "You resent him, hate what he did to you. The only thing you're still in love with is feeling like you're the center of someone's universe." He took a calming breath, but a very lupine growl still rumbled low in his chest. "And why not? You should want to feel special, but not for an arrogant prick like him."

"For an arrogant prick like you, instead?" she teased, trying to lighten the serious mood. She didn't want to think about their problems, didn't want to look into her reasons for being attracted to him, or how giving in to that attraction might affect the future. Maybe this was just another bad decision that she was going to regret later, but for the time being she just wanted to feel. She missed the slide of a man's body against her own, the thrill of molding her soft female curves against hard male plains.

"Exactly right," he whispered, rubbing noses with her. "Exactly right," he repeated, descending to her lips once more.

* * *

A/N: Only one or two more parts left, I think. This part was very conversation heavy… I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or not.

As I said earlier, a lot of this story revolves around things that are not easy to find information on. Earlier I was apologizing about Greencraft. Now I'm going to apologize about mythology. Just about every culture has their own ideas about fertility gods, so there was really too much to assimilate into the story. Also, I was really hoping to model Jareth's story after something that actually happened in mythology, but the closest was Fenrir, a Norse god, and that story was dissimilar enough that I cut out all references. So, once again, I did the research, but in the end I made all the facts up myself.

Once again, thank you to everyone who extended their condolences. It's been a rough couple of months, but things might be pulling together, at last. Also, sorry that I haven't responded to reviews like usual; it's been pretty busy at this end.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Jareth or Sarah.


	6. Never Sit On A Werewolf, part five

**The Never Series**

Never Two: Sarah Williams just bought an old Victorian house to celebrate her divorce from The-Good-For-Nothing that she wasted the last few years of her life on, but she's about to find out that her new home comes with a few extra surprises, not the least of which is an enchanted canine. J/S AU

Genre: Romance, Fantasy

Rating: M

* * *

**Never Sit On A Werewolf**

Part Five

_In some distant way, Sarah knew that she was dreaming—knew that outside of this misty realm she found herself in, her true body was sleeping in the strong arms of a strange god. She knew all that, and yet the dream was so faultlessly realistic, so frighteningly lucid, that she found herself willfully ignoring the fact that it was purely fantasy._

_But, in some ways, it wasn't. Sarah stared, wide-eyed, as she relived the events of just a few short hours ago, witnessed the fervor of a doomed and damning passion._

_She had been primed for the sex, eager for the desperate urgency of pleasure and the simple comfort of touching another living being. And it hadn't felt wrong, either, as it so often had with Isaac; it hadn't felt like a dirty and unbalanced affair, like a shameful duty that had to be performed. With Jareth, sex had been a curious process of give and take: a simple moan got her a wicked smile in return, a stroke against him got a stroke for her, a tug at his hair got her a nip against the neck, and so on. He had been delicate and considerate when she had wanted him to, and delightfully demanding when she hadn't known what to do; one brief affair with her supernatural houseguest had managed to eclipse the entire sum of her former marriage._

_She had, quite naturally, been awed by him. Perhaps it was simply the difference between man and god, but she had never known anyone who took so much pleasure out of simply giving pleasure—with Jareth it might have been a form of conceit, but she was more than to happy to allow him the vice. And maybe, in the end, he was lonely too, and their passion had been born out of a desperation to cling to something while lost within an uncaring world. They had crashed together like a wave upon the shore, both suffering from old wounds, both starved to feel something long forgotten._

_And so it had progressed, one kiss turning into two, a light caress turning into a lingering embrace, until they had both been drunk on desire. She had consented to his touch, forgetting his past and her own, forgetting everything but the feel of him sliding silkily over her. _

_Of course, watching the event from the outside this time, Sarah remembered everything she had ignored, noticed things that had been lost to her in that passionate haze. For one, she remembered Jareth explaining how poisonous his bed play could be—for one night of pleasure she might have damned herself to a loveless future. For another, she noticed a strangeness in Jareth's touch—beneath the tenderness, beneath the urgency there was a possessiveness, as though he knew this would be the first of many times that they would come together in a meeting of flesh. _

_She frowned; he had said something about possession once before, hadn't he? Jareth had raged against Caerlik for robbing him of the ability to possess women, to brand himself into them at the height of passion. Had he been trying to recapture that with her; had their time together merely been an echo of a long-denied conquest? And what had Caerlik said? _

_"He will fuck you and then kill you, woman. You are a fool." The words sliced through her like a diamond through glass, chipping away at her already hardened heart. _

_Was this it, she wondered still watching the ethereal play-back of her first taste of passion in many years. Had Jareth used the details of his unhappy past to lure her in, to soften her to the idea of accepting him into her bed? And if he had, where did that leave her? Would she wake up alone, without a single reminder of the wolfish god to cling to? Or would he carry on as though their desires had never entwined, pursuing other women before her very eyes. For as brief as Sarah had known him, she knew that being subjected to such treatment would kill something within her. Isaac had jaded her, but Jareth had given her hope, if not for love than at least companionship. But with that hope he exerted a horrible power over her—that hope would live and die by his hand, and if he abused that power, Sarah knew that, in the end, he would only reinforce what she had learned from Isaac. _

_Love was an illusion, and romance was a mere trick men played to trap lonely women.  
_

_Sudden laughter broke through her thoughts; a hellish, wicked laughter that chilled her to the bone. Then a voice like the most frigid mountain peak whispered, "Hope is a frail thing, so easily destroyed. You can love, woman, but you shall love in vain."_

_

* * *

_

Sarah awoke with a violent start, immediately aware that something was wrong. Even in the darkness of the night, she could tell that her bed was empty and cold, not a single sign of man or wolf in sight. Dread iced her blood as she wondered if the melancholy ponderings from her dream were coming true. Well, she comforted herself, it wasn't as though she had gone into the affair blindly; she knew what men were like, and Jareth had made no apologies for his past or any promises about the future.

So why did she still feel so hollow?

Throughout the course of her marriage and all the time after her divorce, Sarah had felt empty on the inside—as though Isaac had burned everything, leaving only ash in his wake—but Jareth had made her feel. Irritation, kindness, wonder: he had brought those things and more to life within her just by being around. And now that he was gone, she felt empty once again. Just like her faded Victorian, she felt drained and unwanted.

'But what if he hadn't gone of his own free will?' an insidious voice—the long-forgotten voice of hope—whispered quietly. Sarah clung to that hope; she had been alone for so long, even before the divorce, that she could barely stand the thought of being by herself again. She needed to believe that she hadn't made a fool of herself, that somewhere out there was a man that wanted her just as much as she now knew she wanted him.

But if he hadn't left by his own decision, then who had forced his hand?

Sarah's eyes narrowed as she thought of Meg's Uncle Dillsby—the man, or rather ghost, certainly had a motive and he was as good a place as any to begin looking.

* * *

Sarah had managed to pause her storming long enough to throw on some clothes, and she made it to Meg's house in record time—with no small amount of danger to her life, seeing as driving angrily in the dark wasn't a particularly safe pastime. Even before she opened the unlocked door and stepped into the empty home, she could tell that something was wrong. She had never had these strange instincts before, but she trusted them because they seemed to overshadow the hollowness within her.

"I had a feeling that I'd be seeing you this night," Uncle Dillsby murmured, a ghostly blue light illuminating his form as he materialized in the entranceway.

"What's going on," she demanded hotly, trying to ignore the fact that she was snapping at a dead god. "And don't bother lying to me; I know you know."

His dark eyes narrowed in appreciation, a small smirk flitting about his lips. "Very well," he murmured. "Come with me into the parlor and I'll tell you a story."

"I've already heard enough stories to last me a lifetime," Sarah groused, following him into the curtained off room.

"But not this one," he smiled over his should. "And you need this one, don't you?"

She felt chilled walking back into the room where she had first met the dead man. It was brighter there, bright enough for her to see him. He was still a grizzly mix of beauty and murder: tan skin, blood, and black hair that seemed to dip and wave with a mind of its own. To the very bottom of Sarah's heart, she knew that she wouldn't have been back in that room with Dillsby if she hadn't been so horribly certain that he had something to do with why she hadn't woken up in Jareth's arms. "Well?" she asked impatiently, nervous and unsettled by the situation.

Dillsby held up a bauble—a flashing jewel mounted in an unusual, arching symbol. "Do you know what this is?" he asked, twirling the bauble between his fingers.

"No," she answered, a strange restlessness filling her.

He laughed then, a nasty sound that filled the room and assaulted her senses. "It never ceases to amaze me how oblivious you mortals are! This, my dear," he jangled the trinket before her eyes, "is your soul." Sarah made a reflexive grab for the object, but Dillsby already had it high above her head. "Granted, it's only a small part of your soul—an insignificant trifle, really—but it can still do wonderful things."

"Like what?" she growled, her mind desperately trying to wrap around everything. The bastard had part of her soul? She didn't care how small it was, she wanted it back!

A mean look entered his eyes. "Scare another god into foolishness, perhaps?" He chuckled. "Jareth knows I could crush you, control you, with just this tiny little trinket."

Dillsby crossed the room until he came to sit in a reclining chair and, even with the sudden height advantage it gave her, Sarah still felt vulnerable. And so very violated. Providing that he was telling the truth, this man, this creature before her had ripped out a part of her very being, and she hadn't known it until hours after the fact. If he could do that, what was to stop him from doing more? It was a frightening thought to contemplate.

"Dear me," he said with false joviality, interrupting her thoughts, "I promised you a story, didn't I?"

She glared at him. "I'd much rather know how you thieved off of me."

"And so you shall," he smiled gently. "It is, after all, part of the story." With a grace that belied his nasty nature, he gestured for her to sit opposite him.

"I've already heard about your feud with Jareth," she said shortly, sitting down in a huff. "What more could you possibly add to that?"

"Did you know that I still wed Phaedra, even after Jareth destroyed her?" Dillsby—Caerlik—asked quietly. "Did you know that we had children she was incapable of loving in even the smallest of ways?"

Sarah shook her head.

"I was resigned to not being loved by her," he continued, "but I loved that woman so much, I couldn't imagine a future without her, even if it was an unhappy one. And, thanks to Jareth, it was. Phaedra was never the same," he sighed. " She was bitter and passionless; her eyes, which had once gazed upon me in love and adoration, were distant and frigid. On the rare occasion that we had children, she loved them even less than she loved me. Every day, until her mortal passing, was more brutal and scarring than the last—after so many years, I knew just cursing Jareth to spend half his time as an animal would never be revenge enough." Caerlik shifted, his face caught between despair at the sad story of his wife, and anger with Jareth. "So I told him that if he ever touched one of my children, I would release him from his punishment."

Sarah's eyes narrowed. That offer was certainly too good to be true. "How?" she asked suspiciously.

He smiled, a flicker of appreciation for her sharpness flashing through his eyes. "Death," he answered simply. "He knew there was a catch in that offer just as well as you did, which was why he never took me up on it. He murdered me long before I ever had the chance to murder him." A haziness came over Caerlik for a moment, before he snapped back to attention. "I've been starved for revenge ever since."

"And what exactly is it that you intend to do now?" she inquired, a slow panic building in her gut.

"Intend?" he asked mockingly. "It's already done." He began twirling the bauble between his fingers again. "I took this from you when you first came to see me."

Sarah remembered the horrible feeling she'd had when coming through the room's curtain. It had been as if the fabric had clung to her, sucking away her body's warmth until she'd felt empty and shaken.

"It was just the leverage I needed," Caerlik continued. "Jareth would never sleep with Meg without the proper incentive."

She couldn't deny that what had been done to the god before her had been awful, but it was hard to feel pity for the twisted creature he'd become. "So Meg really is related to you?"

He nodded, his black hair floating serenely around his handsome face.

"And you would use her—and me—to exact your revenge?" She felt cold inside, unbalance and uncertain, but she still had purpose. Her world had narrowed down to one point: Jareth was missing and she wanted him back.

Caerlik shrugged. "I never claimed to be honorable."

"Obviously," she sneered. "So, where is Jareth?"

The dead god smiled bemusedly. "It doesn't work like that, Miss Williams. Haven't you ever studied mythology? You must fight for what you want."

She was fighting, she thought inwardly. "What are you suggesting?"

He smiled wickedly. It wasn't at all like Jareth's wicked smile, which was feral but charmingly playful; this was the smile of a man who had little compassion left. "A game," he said simply.

Was he stalling, or just prolonging her torture? "_What kind of game?_" she snapped, her patience wearing thin.

"It's simple, really," he replied, gesturing smoothly until a small table appeared between them. It was a beautiful table made of polished marble and sweeping spirals of wrought iron, an ethereal concoction of grace and intimidation. Resting on its cool surface was an intriguing maze, a small collection of figurines, and a deck of cards. "We each take turns drawing cards; for every card you can move one of your figurines up to that card's value of paces in any direction. But I'll warn you now: the walls and paths will change between each turn."

Sarah frowned. So it was really just a game of chance then? "My objective is get all my characters through the maze before you do?"

"No," Caerlik shook his head. "Your objective is to meet your opponent in the center of the Labyrinth or along any of the pathways; if one of us gets to the center before the other, they can start to bring more of their figurines onto the board—we start with only one figure each."

She nodded. "And then?"

"Then, once we cross paths or meet at the center, we each draw two cards, and add them together; if your score equals thirteen, your opponent's figurine is removed from play and a new one is placed on the board. Who ever destroys all thirteen of their enemy's figurines first wins." He paused and eyed their playing field, as though searching for anything he might have overlooked. "Do you understand?"

She nodded once more. Now that the whole game had been explained to her, she realized that she needed strategy just as much as she needed luck. The easiest way to win the game was to amass as many figurines at the center as possible in order to overwhelm her opponent. It seemed simple enough, although she had to wonder if Caerlik would play fair or if he would use his powers to cheat. "I understand," she replied.

And so they fought, god against mortal, in a game that was just as challenging as it was childish.

Caerlik overwhelmed her at first. He was ruthless, and cared little for his pieces, going out of his way to confront her within the maze instead of searching for the center of the board. The ghost was bloodthirsty, not at all concerned about safeguarding his life, so long as he got his pound of flesh in return. But, for all his ruthlessness, his game was sloppy. As he chased wildly after her pieces, Sarah slowly drew them to the center of the Labyrinth, building a small army across the board. Caerlik might have destroyed a figurine here or there, but because he rarely had more than one piece on the board at any given moment, he was easy to pick off, one character at a time.

Even given her opponent's narrow-minded strategy, Sarah still found it a hard game to play. One minute she thought herself only a few more paces to the center, and the next minute the entire game had changed. The walls were constantly shifting, thwarting one plan after another, forcing her to backtrack when a dead-end suddenly developed, or unexpectedly bringing her face to face with her enemy when a wall disappeared between turns. She wasn't just fighting Caerlik, she was fighting the very nature of the game as well, and it was maddening.

And then Caerlik began using his pieces in pairs—one to shield and the other to make the kill. The player who had been easy to defeat was suddenly a crushing machine. Sarah was forced to adjust her game, to travel in pairs as well.

The more intense the game became, the harder it was to concentrate. So many things had happened to her in such a short period of time—she had been tested and tried, her world had been turned upside-down, and she wanted nothing more than to rest and think things over. But she needed to know where Jareth was, she needed to know that he was safe, and she craved the hope he had lit within her. Perhaps that did not match the vicious desires of an angry god, but it gave her a purpose, a direction after so long without one. She refused to lose just because she was feeling overwhelmed.

And, in the end, Caerlik had already damned himself; by starting with such a careless strategy, he had allowed her to pull significantly forward in numbers. As long as she was careful, it was easy to ride out any storm he unleashed upon her. It took what felt like an eternity before the final figurine fell but, in the end, Sarah stood the victor.

"So, where is Jareth?" she repeated to the defeated god.

Caerlik sneered, a curious and malicious triumph glowing in his eyes. "He went bounding off after my Meg, of course," he replied sweetly, sweeping the already forgotten game off the table. "I imagine they're locked in a lover's embrace even as we speak."

Tears trailed down her cheeks before he even finished speaking. She had never counted herself as being particularly emotional, but right now she couldn't stop herself. Jareth had meant something to her, had been a sign that she could and would be able to heal from the damage Isaac had caused her. To be betrayed now, when the shadow of her disastrous marriage had finally been lifting, _hurt_. A sob caught in her throat, then another and another, until she finally crumbled.

And just like that, Caerlik deflated, his eyes closing in self-disgust. "Don't cry," he pleaded miserably. Quietly, awkwardly, he came to sit beside her. "Please don't cry. Millennia come and go, and still nothing hurts me so much as seeing a woman in pain."

Sarah hiccupped as he rubbed her back soothingly. She was trying desperately to stop—she didn't want him seeing her so vulnerable—but it was hard to stop once the dam was broken.

Caerlik drew her to his side, letting her sniffle into his chest. "He loves you, if that's any consolation."

She quieted. "How do you know that?" she asked, momentarily thrown off by the dead god's complete switch in personality.

Caerlik snorted, an exasperated sound that burst through him and shook Sarah to her very toes. "He was quite stricken on your behalf; I've never seen him in such an uproar over anyone but himself."

She shook her head disbelievingly. "He's only known me for a day—he can't care that much." Maybe he hadn't even cared at all; he'd admitted to his ceaseless, meaningless conquests—perhaps she was just one more in the unending line of women.

"Love is many things, my dear," he patted her shoulder, "but reasonable has never been among them." He paused, then sighed heavily. "You've dashed my plans quite prettily, you know. Jareth should pay for his sins with blood, and he certainly doesn't deserve you, but you _did_ win… and I would hate to see you suffer because you got stuck in the crossfire."

Her spine stiffened in anger. "How can you say that now, after all the damage you've already caused?"

He shifted uneasily, but met her eyes, a haunted light burning in his own. "It's easy to do anything in theory, it's even easy to forget that your pawns are living creatures, but it is _never_ easy to be shown the suffering of the ones you hadn't focused on. I was happy enough to think of you as a convenient tool but now, after seeing you like this, I can only remember my Phaedra. She was destroyed so easily by the foolishness of two men, and it would kill me just as surely as Jareth's rage did to see you, or any woman, shattered like that. There have already been too many casualties in our little war; I will not add you to the list. Besides," his tone lightened, "you've already done more to him than I ever could."

Her tears slowly drying, Sarah looked to her erstwhile opponent in curiosity. "What do you mean?"

"You've made him care, made him love, and that comes with a mess of trappings—fear, jealousy, anger, compromise, it's all there." He smiled sharply. "I won't get to see him bleed, but I will get to watch him squirm; of course, I'll have to suffer through the annoying periods of happiness, but it's a small price to pay."

Sarah shook her head dejectedly. "None of that will matter if he sleeps with Meg; the situation would just be too complicated for me to handle."

Caerlik laughed outright. "He won't sleep with her."

She frowned. "But you said—"

"Oh, he certainly ran out to find her in a hurry," he agreed, "but I guarantee he only made it about halfway to the girl before he realized that it was ultimately a losing situation. If he slept with Meg he would be free of the curse _and_ you would get back that which I've stolen, but he would lose you in the process. And he won't risk that, because Jareth is nothing, if not persistent about what he wants, and terribly exacting about his acquisition of it. He wants your love, the love of a woman who was emotionally brutalized and yet still had enough heart to accept him in all his strange and dangerous glory."

Sarah froze, trying to process what she was hearing, what it meant to her, and the fact that Caerlik knew more about her than was strictly comfortable.

"If I know him even half as well as I think I do," the dead god continued, "he probably spent the whole journey home thinking of ways to outsmart me, and is currently frantic with worry because you were not there when he got back."

That thought warmed her heart, brought parts of her back to life that she had thought long dead. Someone was waiting for her, wanted to see her, was worried that she wasn't home. When was the last time that had happened? When was the last time she had opened her front door and been greeted by someone who was actually happy to see her?

"Here," Caerlik handed her the small bauble. "I obviously can't go through with my revenge, so you can give that to Jareth."

She frowned. "To Jareth? Why? It's my soul, shouldn't you be returning it to me?"

He smiled warmly, his face lit with a boyish charm, giving Sarah an idea of what he had been like before Phaedra. "It belongs to him now," he replied seriously.

"Great," Sarah muttered, snatching the trinket from his fingers, "as if Meg wasn't bad enough, now even the gods are trying to play matchmaker for me."

"By the way," Caerlik helped her to stand, a patronizing look back on his face, "I respectfully request that you name the first one after me."

She stopped her hasty exit, her hand pausing on the door, and stared at him blankly. "Name the first what after you?"

His patronizing look grew. "Child, of course."

She opened the door, shaking her head. "I'm not having any children; not yet, anyway."

Caerlik's dark eyebrows rose in amusement. "Are you so sure?"

* * *

The drive back to her old Victorian was blessedly short, although it did leave her with enough time to worry about where her future would ultimately lead, and if Caerlik had been implying anything with his parting comment. In those few minutes, a thousand thoughts flashed through her mind, but never once did she suspect what was to greet her upon her arrival.

In the dead of night, under the light of a silver moon, Isaac was pressed flat to Sarah's porch, a very angry wolf crouched atop the man's back. If she hadn't been so genuinely confused at the situation she was walking into, she probably would have taken the time to enjoy the scene. As it stood, she merely shuffled out of her car and walked briskly toward the pair, a question already at her lips. "What's going on?"

"Get him off me!" Isaac wheezed, unsuccessfully trying to topple the canine from his back.

Sarah mounted the step, slowly shuffling alongside Jareth, bemusement and curiosity burning in her eyes. "How'd he even get on you?" she asked her ex.

"The furry little bastard attacked me, that's how!" he shouted, slapping his hands against the ground until Jareth growled menacingly at him.

She ran a hand over the wolf's ears, laughing a little on the inside even as she tried to calm down her ethereal lover. It was nice to see karma biting Isaac in the ass. "Why don't you go back inside, Jareth?"

His blue eyes—lupine, and yet strangely human at the same time—narrowed on her calculatingly. It was hard to guess what was going through his mind, but eventually his hackles dropped and he wandered away from the porch.

"That thing is a fucking menace," Isaac snapped, standing shakily to his feet. "You should have the beast put down."

She rolled her eyes. "You're lucky he didn't kill you, seeing as you were sneaking around my home in the dead of night. And while we're on that subject," she glared at him, standing as tall as possible, "what the hell were you even doing here in the first place?"

He rolled his shoulders and moved closer to her, trying to intimidate her with his height advantage; it was a move that had cowed her during their marriage, but not now. "I wanted to see you," he replied.

"At," Sarah darted a glance to her lit watch, "three in the morning?" She snorted. "Don't lie to me, Isaac, it's just insulting."

He rolled his shoulders, obviously frustrated with her behavior. "You've become quite the suspicious little hen since we separated, haven't you?"

She gave him the stoniest stare she could. "Look, if you're planning to weasel your way out of trouble by shooting the breeze, then we can skip it. I'm exhausted, emotionally drained, and I'm going to call the police tomorrow morning no matter what you say. Let's just skip the asinine pleasantries and be on our separate ways."

His eyes narrowed, a desperate and greedy look twisting his handsome features. "If I'm going to hang, then I might as well do something to deserve it." He eyed her darkened windows. "I'll bet some of those antiques in there will fetch a pretty price."

"You're going to rob me?" she asked, unsurprised. "After all the grief you put me through, you've decided that it would be fun to kick me while I'm down?"

"Why not?" Isaac smiled nastily, turning away from her and walking straight into a fist.

"Because," Sarah smiled, watching as Jareth—completely human and quite pissed off—fisted a hand in Isaac's shirt, "I'm not exactly 'down' at the moment. Or alone."

Isaac was an inch or two taller than Jareth, but Jareth had more presence than Isaac could ever hope to achieve. The cursed god radiated primal, vicious power—it was a strength and bearing that was even more feral than his wolf form. And it terrified Isaac.

Panicked, his left eye already swelling from the hit, the scheming weasel tried to pry Jareth's hand off of him. "I'll leave," he wailed, after a few moments, "I swear it."

Jareth nodded, a dangerous haze clouding his eyes. "Yes," he crooned quietly, "you _will_ be leaving." His free hand came up to stroke along the other man's throat, pressing against his jugular threateningly. "And you won't be coming back, will you?"

Isaac stopped struggling, his body going curiously limp as a blank daze overtook his face. "No," he responded, his tone flat, "I won't."

Jareth released him, watching as the man swayed on his feet before catching his balance. "Run along, then," he suggested firmly. "And be thankful you were spared."

Sarah watched in bemusement as Isaac tottered off her property, moving like a limp rag doll before breaking into a run. "I doubt that's the last I'll see of him," she shook her head, turning back to Jareth. "Isaac's like a cockroach: no matter what you do, you can't keep him from coming back and you certainly can't kill him."

Jareth smiled softly, but there was murder in his eyes. "I enjoy a good challenge," he murmured, staring off into the distance, as though he could still see Isaac—and perhaps he could. After a few moments the deadly haze seemed to clear from him, and he turned his blue eyes to Sarah. "Where did you go?"

It was strange to hear that question again; no one had cared to know for so long. "Looking for you," she replied, stepping into the house.

He followed, closing the door loudly enough to startle both of them. "Please tell me you didn't—"

She held up a hand, cutting him off. "It was logical. Caerlik and Meg were the only other people I'd ever seen you interact with."

"Are you all right?" he asked quickly, assessing her with narrowed eyes. "He didn't hurt you?"

She slumped onto the sofa, lounging across it as the day finally caught up with her. "I'm fine, but there's something I need to know." She paused, closing her eyes. "Did you sleep with Meg?"

He didn't answer her for so long that her heart began to ache. Surreptitiously, she opened her eyes and snuck a glance at him. He was leaning over the back of her sofa, his lips quirked as he shook his head. "The only person I've slept with tonight is you." He sighed heavily. "I know I'm being greedy, but I promise you we'll find another way to get your soul back from Caerlik," he bent over the back of the sofa, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "I won't rest until it's done," he assured her, his lips whispering against her skin.

"You have a chance to be free of your curse," she responded quietly, enjoying his light caress. "I don't want to take that opportunity away from you."

"You aren't," Jareth murmured. "Caerlik would never let me be free of the curse and live—his schemes have always been painfully transparent. The important thing right now is to figure out what we can do to get the part of your soul that he's stolen."

Sarah quirked a smile. "Don't bother." She held out her hand, the small arching bauble resting in her palm. "I've already taken care of it."

His blue eyes rounded in astonishment. "How?"

"He's terrible at board games," she said, a confused smile pulling at her lips.

Jareth snorted. "Caerlik never was much of a tactician. Still, this all seems a little hard to believe."

"There was crying involved," she replied flippantly.

"Ah," he responded lowly, "he never could handle a crying woman."

"Here," she moved her hand closer to him, offering up the bauble. "Much to my chagrin, Caerlik said it was for you."

Jareth moved from behind the sofa, walking around it until he was in front of her. He crouched there, laying his head on her stomach as he took the trinket from her. "You know, it's not every day that I get the blessing of a god I've managed to piss off in every way possible," he met her green eyes seriously, "and yet you still look concerned. Why is this?"

"You're still cursed," she shook her head. "You've been tortured for who knows how long, and I went through an epic battle for you—well, all right, it wasn't an _epic_ battle, per se—but nothing's changed."

He chuckled against her belly. "We have. You can't deny that we've both moved toward something more serious than either of us were intending; that's something, isn't it?" He shrugged, "I can live with being cursed, so long as you're around. We're both alive; that's all that matters."

"I still feel bad," she responded, running a hand through his silky hair.

"Then, think about it this way," he replied, leaning in to her touch. "Our children will have two things to celebrate in the winter: Christmas, and a couple of extra hours with daddy."

"Children?" her hand froze. Why did everyone keep suggesting that she was going to get pregnant? "Who said we're having any children?"

Jareth flashed her his wolfish smile. "I did, just now."

"Oh no," Sarah smacked his head lightly, "it's hard enough wrapping my mind around the fact that my lover is a god; kids are just out of the question."

"But I'm a fertility god," he argued, "you can't expect to be with a fertility god and not get pregnant!"

**_The End._**

* * *

A/N: Yes, Sarah's soul-bauble is Jareth's necklace from the movie. Also, I was going to have Sarah and Caerlik play Mancala, but decided against it for three reasons: 1) In the variation I play, I figured out a while ago how to essentially win in the first turn; 2) it is both hard and boring to narrate; and 3) I wanted to incorporate the Labyrinth somehow.

I'M ALIVE! You're all shocked, aren't you? I'm going to be very blunt about this, because I don't have the fortitude to dance around the subject right now, and you guys deserve an explanation. I've been having a lot of problems in my personal life for a while, swinging between periods of massive creativity and complete apathy (which explains why I write like a maniac and then disappear for months on end). Some friends helped me work up the nerve to seek help for this, and I've been tentatively diagnosed with Bipolar II. It's a messy process—figuring out what's wrong and what can be done—and it's leaving my life in a constant state of change, which is extremely unbalancing. Writing has always been a stabilizing influence for me, so I'm back once more (and with Labyrinth this time!), but I can't promise you guys anything right now.

That being said, it's my _intention_ to go back to Listen For Thunder now. I have no idea when the next chapter will be up, because before I can continue the story I need to go back over everything and decide if there should be some re-writes. I will try to stay in the Labyrinth fandom long enough to finish it, if not longer, and do my best not to start any new long, chaptered stories until LFT is done.

Please Review!

Disclaimer: I do not own Labyrinth or any of its characters.


End file.
